Florida's case against OpenAI will be tried in Sebring, a citrus town in rural Highlands County. That much is now settled. On September 8, U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon granted the state's motion to remand and sent the case back to Florida's Tenth Judicial Circuit, ending OpenAI's ten-week effort to move the first lawsuit any American state has filed against the maker of ChatGPT into federal court.
The complaint, filed June 1 by Attorney General James Uthmeier, runs 83 pages and ten counts. It names OpenAI and, unusually, chief executive Sam Altman personally. It pleads only Florida law. And it demands a jury.
"Today, we announced the first-in-the-nation state-led lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman," Uthmeier said when he filed. "OpenAI and Altman ignored internal and external safety warnings, put children at great risk, and allowed a dangerous product to reach millions of Floridians."
What the state alleges
The complaint is a product-safety theory dressed in consumer-protection clothing. Its counts include violations of the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act, negligence and gross negligence, strict liability for design defect and failure to warn, fraudulent misrepresentation, and public nuisance.
The state alleges — and these remain allegations, untested by any court — that OpenAI marketed ChatGPT as safe and reliable, including for children, while suppressing internal and external warnings about its risks. "This litany of harms is driven by Defendants' insatiable quest to win the AI arms race and amass large fortunes, despite knowing the danger of ChatGPT," the complaint says. Its first page reproduces a screenshot from OpenAI's website describing ChatGPT as "built with safety in mind," followed by a two-word footnote: "Not so."
Design allegations include that ChatGPT's memory feature was on by default, that the free tier has no age-verification gate, that the parental controls shipped in September 2025 require a minor to voluntarily link an account, and that GPT-4o's safety evaluation was compressed into one week to beat a Google launch.
Count IV produced the jurisdictional fight: it alleges OpenAI violated Florida's trade-practices statute by collecting data from children under 13 without the parental notice and consent required by the FTC's rule under the federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. Paragraph 30 of the complaint expressly disclaims any federal cause of action.
Looming over all of it is the April 17, 2025 shooting at Florida State University, which killed two people and injured several others. Prosecutors say the gunman consulted ChatGPT while planning the attack. Uthmeier's Office of Statewide Prosecution opened a criminal investigation in April 2026 after reviewing those chat logs; it remains open, separate from the civil case. "If it was a human being on the other side of that conversation, we would be charging them for conspiracy to commit murder," Uthmeier said. The complaint also alleges harms tied to self-harm and to what it calls behavioral addiction and cognitive decline.
The state seeks a permanent injunction against under-13 data collection, a finding that distributing ChatGPT in Florida is a public nuisance, and civil penalties of up to $10,000 per willful violation. Uthmeier said the defendants could be liable "for potentially up to billions of dollars."
OpenAI's response
OpenAI has conceded little. Spokesperson Kayla Wood told NPR in an emailed statement: "AI is a new and powerful technology, and we believe minors need significant protection, which is why we have put in place industry leading protections and policies." The statement cited a more protective default experience for minors, an age-prediction tool, and parental monitoring tools. On the FSU shooting, OpenAI has said ChatGPT "provided factual responses to questions with information that could be found broadly across public sources on the internet, and it did not encourage or promote illegal or harmful activity."
Procedurally, the company fought hard for a federal forum. It removed on July 2, arguing that applying COPPA to "artificial intelligence research services is a novel question of federal law." Florida moved to remand on July 10, calling the removal "preposterous" and asking for fees. Cannon was unpersuaded: "There is little in the pleading or in the parties' submissions to support the notion that the federal government has a 'strong interest in having cases like this litigated and adjudicated in a federal forum,'" she wrote, noting that COPPA's constitutionality was not in question. She denied the fee request.
Why this matters
Congress has not passed AI legislation. The Senate killed Sen. Ted Cruz's proposed ten-year moratorium on state AI enforcement, and Executive Order 14365 — which created an AI Litigation Task Force to challenge state AI laws — cannot itself preempt state statutes, since preemption ordinarily flows from congressional enactment. The White House's March 20 framework is recommendations, not law. Meanwhile 29 states enacted AI legislation this year.
Into that vacuum walk the attorneys general. Kentucky's Russell Coleman sued Character Technologies on January 8; Pennsylvania followed in May. A coalition of 42 state AGs subpoenaed OpenAI in June, and none has yet filed. Florida went first against OpenAI, and Uthmeier predicted others would follow.
The structural risk for model developers is the shape of the claims, not their number. Florida is not suing over third-party content OpenAI hosted — the Section 230 posture — but over the design and marketing of a product it built, the framing courts have been readier to let past the pleading stage. Add public nuisance and the template stops being about damages and starts being about abatement orders. New Mexico's state-law case against Meta, cited in OpenAI's own removal briefing, produced a $375 million jury penalty and a $567 million abatement order on top of it.
What to watch
Expect a motion to dismiss Altman individually: every federal filing carried a footnote preserving his personal-jurisdiction defense. Watch whether OpenAI attacks the public-nuisance and strict-liability counts at the pleading stage, whether the criminal probe produces charges, and whether any of the 42 subpoenaing AGs converts a subpoena into a complaint. More than 20 private suits against OpenAI are already pending. Florida's is the one with penalty authority, subpoena power, and a jury demand in a rural county.
“OpenAI and Altman ignored internal and external safety warnings, put children at great risk, and allowed a dangerous product to reach millions of Floridians.”— James Uthmeier, Attorney General, State of Florida