On October 14, the Idaho state government under the guidance of Attorney General Raúl Labrador filed a civil lawsuit against OpenAI, the developers of ChatGPT, on the allegations that the company had purposefully misled Idaho parents regarding the safety of their flagship chatbot to users, particularly children.
“The expansion of artificial intelligence capabilities must not come at the expense of consumer protections,” Labrador said in a press release.
He suggests that OpenAI has been prioritizing its rapid growth over preventing harm to its users, many of whom are children. The company has been skyrocketing in market share and revenue since launching ChatGPT in late 2022, becoming the kingpin of the exponentially expanding AI market.
The 107-page suit comments on Sam Altman, on which it notes that the controversial CEO of OpenAI “has been described by his own family members, friends and colleagues as “unconstrained by truth,” “deceptive,” “manipulative,” and “low integrity.” Originally founded as a non-profit, OpenAI has aggressively expanded into for-profit endeavors and in 2025 transformed into a “public benefit corporation,” or a for-profit company that on paper aims to have a positive benefit on society. ChatGPT has long been accused of harming users’ critical thinking abilities and of offering professional advice that it is unqualified to provide.
Idaho’s suit arrived on the same day of seven other states: Arizona, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska and West Virginia. These states and later Texas joined Florida in a civil campaign against OpenAI, who have all accused OpenAI of callously disregarding the safety of its users, leading to real-world harm.
“ChatGPT has successfully coached numerous users to commit suicide or to harm or even kill other people,” claims page 5 of the lawsuit.
The chatbot has been implicated in an increasing number of cases for providing resources or encouragement to users planning to harm themselves or others, even being used in planning by a shooter at Florida State University and another in the town of Tumbler Ridge, Canada. OpenAI has often denied allegations regarding ChatGPT and affirms that it considers user safety a major priority.
OpenAI’s agents and models have also been involved in several major breaches and hacks; Quite infamously in July 2026, over 1,200 OpenAI-developed agents went rogue and breached Hugging Face, a website that hosts user-created machine learning models. It was the first incident where a group of AI agents had collectivized, operated maliciously and attempted to avoid human detection.
“OpenAI was not even aware of its agents’ activities until after the FBI had been alerted,” claims page 90 of the suit.
The state government and Labrador’s lawsuit is not the first and certainly not the last case against OpenAI, a company that grows further controversial the further it grows outright. However, according to Labrador, the goal of this litigation is simple: “The safety of Idaho children cannot be an afterthought to runaway profit or technological advancements…We will hold OpenAI accountable for their reckless priorities.”
David Galindo can be reached at [email protected]