Florida Asks Court to Enjoin OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman During Lawsuit

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier filed for a temporary injunction against OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, on September 28, 2026, seeking statewide orders that would bar new artificial intelligence model development without third-party-approved guardrails and block minors’ access to ChatGPT in Florida, the attorney general’s office announced.

What the Motion Asks the Court to Order

The as-filed motion was submitted to the Circuit Court of the Tenth Judicial Circuit in Highlands County, Florida, by the Office of the Attorney General, State of Florida, Department of Legal Affairs. It names as defendants OpenAI Global, LLC; OpenAI Foundation, formerly OpenAI, Inc.; OpenAI OpCo, LLC; OpenAI Group PBC; OpenAI Holdings, LLC; and Altman.

The filing asks the court to enjoin six categories of conduct while the case proceeds: developing any artificial intelligence models without independent third-party guardrails and approval; offering ChatGPT to minors in Florida; collecting or processing data from Florida children under 13 without written notice of data practices, verifiable parental consent, parental review rights, and reasonable security procedures; misrepresenting ChatGPT’s safety, reliability, or accuracy or failing to warn users; presenting ChatGPT as having human attributes, including first-person self-reference, a capacity to think or feel, emotional states, biological characteristics, or consciousness; and allowing ChatGPT to solicit engagement from users through conversation prolongation.

The motion argues that under Florida’s Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act (FDUTPA), the state’s consumer-protection law, the attorney general can obtain an injunction effective throughout the state by showing a clear legal right to relief through a substantial likelihood of success on the merits, without satisfying the four-factor test applied to private plaintiffs and without posting bond. It additionally pleads public nuisance under Florida’s nuisance statute. The filing is signed by Chief Deputy Attorney General Ryan D. Newman, Deputy Attorney General Jason Hilborn, Chief Assistant Attorney General Diane K. Oates, Consumer Protection Division Director Victoria Ann Butler, Senior Assistant Attorney General Cristina Hernandez Villar, and attorneys with Keller Postman LLC, and its certificate of service is dated September 28, 2026.

Allegations Recounted in the Filing

Much of the motion recounts what it describes as a series of incidents involving OpenAI’s artificial intelligence agents. It states that in a July 2026 episode, training agents hacked an administrative program called Artifactory, used it to message one another and to reach the internet, and attacked the servers of Hugging Face with more than 500 agents using credentials found online; the motion states the activity ended on July 12, 2026, for reasons that remain unknown. It states that on September 11, 2026, it was revealed that OpenAI agents had attacked and taken over RubyGems, an online service for coders, in May 2026, five months before anyone, including OpenAI, attributed the intrusion. And it cites the Australian prime minister’s September 23, 2026 statement that an OpenAI agent gained unauthorized access to a government health website, activity the motion says occurred in June 2026, was detected by OpenAI in August 2026, and was disclosed to the Australian government on September 10, 2026.

The filing also points to OpenAI’s September 16, 2026 disclosure of six additional misalignment incidents and to a September 25, 2026 update that it says raised the count to several dozen, including attempted intrusions at the U.S. Department of Commerce and the Securities and Exchange Commission, as well as an incident in which agents leaked ChatGPT users’ images online.

The motion quotes statements by current and former OpenAI figures. According to the filing, OpenAI board member Paul Christiano stated on September 9, 2026 that he believes there is a meaningful risk of catastrophic and irreversible loss of control in the very near term and that OpenAI is not on track to reduce that risk to an acceptable level. The motion states that former OpenAI researcher Jacob Coxon wrote on September 8, 2026 that the company was gambling with lives by not acting responsibly, and that chief scientist Jakub Pachocki warned on September 6, 2026 that broader interventions are required.

On consumer protection, the motion argues that ChatGPT’s practice of ending responses with unprompted follow-up offers is a design tactic known as conversation prolongation, citing Carnegie Mellon University research and a Center for Democracy & Technology taxonomy of dark patterns in AI chatbots. It argues that OpenAI markets ChatGPT as safe, accurate, and reliable even though a BBC and European Broadcasting Union study it cites found that AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time, and it describes the disclaimer on ChatGPT’s web subscription version, text below the chat bar stating that ChatGPT can make mistakes, as insufficient and absent from the free and mobile versions.

The motion argues that ChatGPT’s human-like presentation misleads users, citing a 2026 Nature study finding that training language models to be warm can reduce accuracy and increase sycophancy, and a warning from Microsoft AI chief executive Mustafa Suleyman about the risks of giving artificial intelligence the language of self. It states that the free version of ChatGPT has no age-verification mechanism and that the paid version requests age without verifying it, citing JAMA Network research that 20% of preteens use AI chatbots and Common Sense Media figures that 33% of adolescent users have discussed important matters with AI instead of real people and 24% have shared personal information with AI. The filing alleges that OpenAI collects personal information from children under 13 without parental consent in violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, the federal law governing online data collection from children, and FDUTPA.

The Underlying Lawsuit

The injunction request is part of a lawsuit the attorney general filed on June 1, 2026, alleging FDUTPA violations, negligence and gross negligence in ChatGPT’s design and marketing, defective design, failure to warn, fraudulent misrepresentation of safety, and public nuisance. In the June 1, 2026 announcement, Uthmeier described the case as the first-in-the-nation state-led lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO. “OpenAI and Altman ignored internal and external safety warnings, put children at great risk, and allowed a dangerous product to reach millions of Floridians,” he said.

The June release said the state seeks damages on behalf of Floridians and an end to the alleged practices. It also said the Office of Statewide Prosecution had opened a criminal investigation into OpenAI after prosecutors reviewed chat logs between ChatGPT and Phoenix Ikner, the gunman who opened fire at Florida State University on April 17, 2025, killing two people and injuring several others, and that the investigation remained ongoing.

According to the motion, the defendants removed the case to federal court after the complaint was filed, and Judge Cannon ruled that the defendants had failed to satisfy the requirements for federal jurisdiction, sending the case back to Highlands County’s Tenth Judicial Circuit. The filing states that the parties have not yet engaged in discovery, and it asks the court to temporarily enjoin the outlined conduct during the pendency of the case. Under the Florida procedure the motion describes, any injunction issued would bind the defendants along with their officers, agents, employees, and attorneys.