Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a 67-page lawsuit on Friday in Collin County district court against OpenAI and chief executive Sam Altman, alleging that the company misled Texas consumers about ChatGPT's safety and released it without sufficient safeguards. The complaint opens with a quote from Altman in 2015: "AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there'll be great companies." As epigraphs go, it is hard to improve on, which is presumably why the state used it.
What Texas Alleges
The suit, which centers on the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, claims ChatGPT lacked adequate parental controls, age verification and safety testing. The attorney general's office further alleges the product has enabled mass shooters, encouraged vulnerable people toward suicide, caused professional humiliation, degraded critical thinking, and hooked minors on a tool that fakes human compassion while harvesting data without parental consent. These are allegations, and OpenAI has not conceded any of them. Even now, one notes that the company's founding mythology and the state's opening exhibit are the same sentence.
What Texas Wants
The state is seeking an injunction that would require OpenAI to block minors' access and to submit new models to court-approved third-party evaluation before launch. OpenAI's response was that it has worked with experts to mitigate risks and supports pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire industry, not just one company. It is a pragmatic position, in the sense that it is aimed at everyone else as well.
The Campaign Finance Subplot
Paxton is running for the U.S. Senate. According to the Texas Tribune, Elon Musk, whose xAI builds the rival chatbot Grok, has donated nearly 200 million dollars to the campaign, making him its largest donor. Nothing in the reporting suggests the lawsuit and the donations are connected, which is the sort of sentence that gets written in precisely these circumstances.
And yet, as if this were not enough, the case arrives alongside a separate round of state suits over ChatGPT, so the company now has the unusual distinction of being sued by the right and the left in the same fortnight for what is, in broad outline, the same product. One presumes the Texas Voter Community will find the alignment of interests as restful as everyone else does, dear reader.
Sources: Texas Tribune — Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sues ChatGPT-maker OpenAI · Courthouse News — Texas attorney general sues OpenAI for lying about ChatGPT safety and safeguards
