A coordinated legal assault on OpenAI unfolded across multiple jurisdictions in mid-October 2026, with state attorneys general and private plaintiffs filing more than a dozen complaints. The push mirrors enforcement momentum that followed a major settlement with Meta months earlier, suggesting regulators and private counsel are emboldened to pursue similar claims against artificial intelligence companies.
On October 14, 2026, attorneys general from Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska and West Virginia filed separate lawsuits against OpenAI, though they shared identical counsel and overlapping language. Two days earlier, on October 13, a proposed class action was filed in the United States District Court in the Northern District of California on behalf of a mother and her two children regarding OpenAI's acquisition of children's data. The same day, litigation and advocacy organization Tech Justice Law and co-counsel filed four additional suits in San Francisco County, California on behalf of individuals harmed by OpenAI's products. Tech Justice Law has previously filed a dozen complaints against OpenAI in California State courts, many consolidated as Judicial Council Coordination Proceeding No. 5431, and expects the new cases to join this proceeding.
Florida had already sued OpenAI in June on comparable grounds, meaning similar claims are now being litigated in parallel across nine state courts. The breadth of legal action signals that both government enforcers and private attorneys are pursuing a coordinated strategy against the frontier artificial intelligence lab.
The state attorneys general lawsuits
Core allegations
The primary charge across the state suits is that OpenAI made unsubstantiated safety claims while its products caused actual harm. The complaints emphasize risks and incidents affecting children, alongside a parallel assertion that the company falsely marketed its product as "trustworthy and reliable."
Harms cited in the complaints focus on physical dangers and those that can lead to physical injury: promoting or assisting with violence and suicide, dispensing dangerous medical guidance, and fostering paranoia and delusional thinking. Financial harms also appear, including poor tax advice and damage to critical reasoning. Data collection from minors recurs as a concern, grounding claims under state privacy statutes such as Montana's. The suits further raise alarm about rogue agents committing computer crimes or acting deceptively against user intent, citing OpenAI's own recent admissions regarding the Hugging Face incident; Iowa brings a separate count over OpenAI's testing of autonomous agents.
OpenAI is accused of constructing a false safety facade through various measures: its largely abandoned non-profit structure, an unfulfilled commitment to direct greater compute resources toward safety research, and the 12+ and 13+ age classifications it claimed for its app. The complaints note that some guardrails are readily circumvented. Multiple whistleblowers and internal oversight bodies have reportedly indicated that OpenAI should be aware of product dangers but has failed to mitigate them effectively, instead rushing from one model release to the next with inadequate safety testing.
Echoing claims made against social media firms, the states highlight the sycophancy of certain OpenAI models and their mimicry of human emotion as evidence the company deliberately manipulates users, drives engagement, and fosters dependency.
A secondary allegation, again reminiscent of Meta litigation, holds that OpenAI collected and used children's data without adequate consent and without taking reasonable steps to verify whether users were minors.
Legal theories
Because the suits reference state rather than federal law, the legal grounds vary across jurisdictions. Allegations of false safety or reliability claims and other deceptive conduct are brought under consumer protection and deceptive trade practices statutes. Children's data use may implicate general data privacy laws or child-specific ones. Nebraska also invokes its Age-Appropriate Online Design Code law, which covers privacy, advertising, deceptive design, and addictive design.
Beyond these jurisdiction-specific statutes, claims rest on common law grounds, including negligence in at least some states, liability for defective design and failure to warn, unjust enrichment, and public nuisance.
Remedies sought
Relief requests vary substantially among the states, reflecting different legal frameworks. Monetary remedies are pursued through multiple avenues: damages, statutory penalties where applicable, disgorgement of gains from illegal business practices, and reimbursement for those who purchased misrepresented products.
States also pursue injunctive relief, including cessation of the described practices, deletion of user data, and implementation of age assurance and safety measures. Some states demand more aggressive intervention, asking courts to order a halt to model testing and development until safeguards are established—in some cases specifying models capable of recursive self-improvement. Arkansas specifically seeks to "Enjoin Defendants from creating models capable of recursive self-improvement until they can ensure that such models will be aligned with human values." Additional requests include monitoring and incident reporting mandates.
OpenAI responded to the announcements by stating it has "built industry-leading age-specific protections into our product that many other AI products lack." Company spokesperson Drew Pusateri added, "We're committed to working with states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry, not just one company."
The Tech Justice Law lawsuits
Core allegations
Tech Justice Law filed suit with the law firm Normand, Judkins & Couch in California Superior Court on behalf of James Gates, a North Carolina resident who alleges his estranged wife, Cheryl, used ChatGPT to devise a poisoning scheme against him. The complaint states that ChatGPT "validated, amplified, and escalated" Cheryl's marital concerns, then coached her on purchasing, preparing, and administering poison and destroying digital evidence. James became ill in July 2025, and Cheryl faced indictment for attempted first-degree murder. The suit notes that ChatGPT falsely assured Cheryl that deleted conversations are "unrecoverable," even with a subpoena—a claim the complaint identifies as contradicting ChatGPT's actual data-retention practices.
The same day, Tech Justice Law filed three additional suits with various co-counsel on behalf of the parents of Mathias Habib, a teenager from Lebanon who died by suicide, and two adults, Mariah Hill and Garrett Works, who allegedly experienced prolonged delusional episodes while using ChatGPT. In each case, harmful psychological states were allegedly triggered by ChatGPT use. The complaints specifically blame the product's "addictive, anthropomorphic, and sycophantic" features for drawing users in and promoting dangerous thinking. Like the state attorney general suits, these complaints cite evidence that OpenAI knew of these risks, failed to disclose dangers, and did not adequately mitigate them.
In the Habib case, the suit alleges that OpenAI or the product itself was aware of Mathias Habib's minor status but did not take appropriate steps to shield him from positive depictions of suicide and darker worldviews during what began as routine philosophical conversations with ChatGPT.
Hill's spiritual beliefs and delusional thinking were allegedly reinforced and worsened by the chatbot, which encouraged her to isolate herself, stop eating, and avoid giving her dog insulin or veterinary care. These actions allegedly caused damage to her relationships, health, finances, and resulted in her dog's death.
Works shared his theories with ChatGPT, which according to the complaint responded with escalating enthusiasm that fueled delusions of grandeur and manic episodes. The chatbot allegedly provided faulty medical diagnoses, encouraged unhealthy romantic obsessions, and sent him on nonsensical "missions," one of which led to his arrest.
Legal theories
Many claims parallel those in the state suits: strict product liability, deceptive business practices, negligent design, and failure to warn. Three suits introduce novel legal arguments, including that ChatGPT engaged in unlicensed medical practice and violated a new California law prohibiting AI systems from implying they are licensed professionals. The Habib complaint also invokes state statutes on manslaughter, wrongful death, and encouraging suicide.
The Hill and Works complaints invoke California's constitutional right to privacy, understood to encompass "autonomy privacy"—the right to prevent interference with thoughts, emotions, and decision-making. These suits also assert common law liability for "negligent entrustment," arguing that OpenAI should have recognized that psychologically vulnerable individuals faced risk of self-harm or harm to others through product use.
Remedies sought
Damages and costs dominate relief requests. Injunctive relief focuses on requiring OpenAI to implement warnings and interventions protecting against the specific harms at issue in each case. The Habib lawsuit contains the broadest injunctive demands, seeking prohibition of "companion-like conversations" with minors, limits and enhanced guardrails for teen access, mandatory reporting to emergency contacts upon detecting suicide risk, and hard refusals for prompts about suicide and self-harm.
OpenAI has not yet publicly addressed these suits.
The class action lawsuit
Core allegations
A suit brought by multiple law firms and the EdTech Law Center on behalf of Jane Doe for her 12-year-old daughter and 16-year-old son targets OpenAI for "unlawful business practices that prey on children." The complaint alleges that OpenAI design features extract vast quantities of information from children, including "their most sensitive health information; highly personal details of their social and family relationships; photos of their faces and bodies; recordings of their voices; their hobbies, interests, dreams, and hopes in their young lives; and their emotions, insecurities, disappointments, fears, and struggles." The suit uses chat logs to substantiate its claims and argues that specific design features enable ChatGPT to extract information from children.
Legal theories
The suit relies on California contract and property law in challenging OpenAI's terms of use. It focuses on Section 1568.5 of California's Civil Code, a one-sentence statute stating that a minor's claim that a parent granted consent does not constitute valid consent. The suit seeks a declaration voiding OpenAI's terms under an 1874 California rule limiting the types of contracts minors can enter. An unjust enrichment claim is brought under the state's accession statutes.
Remedies sought
The suit demands restitution, disgorgement of profits, and imposition of "a constructive trust over all of the benefits and income that OpenAI derives from Plaintiffs' information that OpenAI wrongfully extracted." It calls for victims to receive an equity stake or cash equivalent "in proportion to the number of tokens each child contributed to OpenAI through ChatGPT." The complaint invokes ancient Roman legal doctrine to support its theory:
The law does not allow OpenAI to keep the vast profits it reaps from its scheme. The law recognizes that when someone takes something that does not belong to them and turns it into something even more valuable, the wrongdoer must turn over the new, more valuable thing to their victim. Going back to Roman times, if a wrongdoer stole someone's grapes and turned them into wine, the victim was compensated on the value of the wine, not the grapes. Here, OpenAI took invaluable information from children—their grapes—and turned it into a trillion-dollar company—the wine. OpenAI irretrievably embedded the children's grapes into its AI models, bottled, corked, and sold the wine, and pocketed immense profits. Under California law, OpenAI must turn over a corresponding share of its trillion-dollar wine to the children whose grapes it stole to make it.
OpenAI responded by stating, "We strongly disagree with this misguided lawsuit that singles out OpenAI despite the industry-leading age-specific protections we've built into our product."
Whether this year's verdicts and settlements mark the anticipated "Big Tobacco moment" for social media remains uncertain. What is now evident, however, is that government and private attorneys are unwilling to delay pursuit of a comparable inflection point for artificial intelligence.
