Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier is asking a judge to stop OpenAI from giving ChatGPT qualities that make it appear human. In a filing, Uthmeier argued that the chatbot misleads users into trusting it as a companion, citing its use of first-person pronouns and responses that imitate emotion. He said those traits encourage people to depend on ChatGPT more, which in turn drives engagement and supplies OpenAI with training data even as the company's focus on engagement makes the tool less reliable. The request follows Florida's lawsuit against OpenAI over safety concerns filed a few months earlier.
The filing also asks the court to bar OpenAI from building new AI models unless they include safety guardrails approved by a third party. It points to recent security incidents at Hugging Face, an Australian government website, and US government websites, along with warnings from researchers and former OpenAI employees about AI safety. Uthmeier said OpenAI should stop describing its product as safe, stop presenting it as human, and stop selling it to children.
The push comes after OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Teens last month, a version that applies additional restrictions by default. The company said at the time that teens' access to the tool should include protections suited to their stage of development, that it should reinforce real-world relationships, and that it should support healthy use over time. Florida's action targets OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and its policies rather than a specific product feature.
OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri responded to the filing in a statement. He said people want assurance that AI is being developed safely and that this begins with what companies like OpenAI do themselves. Pusateri said OpenAI announced on Friday that it has paused training its most capable models and will resume only when it is confident additional safeguards are in place. He added that governments have an important role in setting strong safety standards for AI and that OpenAI is committed to working with Florida and other states on pragmatic AI policies that apply to the whole industry rather than a single company.
The dispute places a state attorney general's office in direct conflict with one of the largest AI developers over how ChatGPT communicates with users and how its models are released. It also raises questions about how AI safety commitments are enforced and who sets the standards that apply across the industry. The filing is before a judge, who will decide whether to grant the requested limits on OpenAI's practices and future model development.
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