Florida AG seeks court injunction to restrict OpenAI and ChatGPT

By Splitfeed EditorialLast updated Sep 29, 2026, 13:41 UTC

On September 28, 2026, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier filed an emergency motion in an existing child harm lawsuit against OpenAI, asking a court to enjoin the company and its CEO Sam Altman from developing new AI models. The motion requests that ChatGPT be blocked from minors entirely and that OpenAI meet unspecified safety standards before any further model releases. Uthmeier's legal argument rests partly on the claim that ChatGPT's use of first-person pronouns and emotion-mimicking language constitutes deception, effectively tricking users into treating the chatbot as a trusted companion. The motion also invokes extinction-level risks as part of its justification, an unusual step for a state-level filing. OpenAI has not publicly responded to the motion in available sources.

The case matters beyond its immediate legal stakes for a few reasons. Naming Altman personally alongside the company raises the pressure considerably, since an injunction covering him individually would be rare and consequential. The argument that conversational language patterns amount to deceptive design is a novel legal theory that, if a court entertains it seriously, could set a precedent affecting how AI products are built and marketed across the country. Halting new model development outright, even temporarily, would be an extraordinary intervention into a company that has become a central node in global technology investment. Frank Bajak, writing on Bluesky, noted that SoftBank recently raised more than eleven billion dollars in the largest junk bond issue in history specifically to finance an investment in OpenAI, illustrating how much financial exposure now rides on the company's continued operation.

The Anti-AI camp is likely to treat this motion as overdue accountability, pointing to the child safety framing and the deceptive-design argument as legitimate regulatory concerns that the federal government has failed to address. Bajak's comment about record debt levels fits a broader critique that the financial system is dangerously overextended in support of these companies. The Pro-AI camp, which has not reacted publicly yet, would typically argue that this kind of state-level injunction sets a damaging precedent, conflates normal conversational design with fraud, and risks stifling a sector of genuine economic and scientific value. The Middle Ground camp, also silent so far, would generally call for targeted child-safety rules rather than a blanket halt on model development.

The immediate question is whether the court grants the emergency injunction, which would impose restrictions while the underlying lawsuit proceeds. Any ruling or hearing date set by the presiding judge would be the next concrete marker in this case.