Florida Seeks to Block OpenAI Over AI Extinction Risks

Florida filed a motion Monday morning asking a state court to grant a temporary injunction against OpenAI, seeking to halt further development of what the state calls a "reckless, unacceptably risky product." The filing builds on a civil lawsuit Florida brought in June, which accused ChatGPT of endangering the public, particularly children and adults in crisis, through inadequate safeguards.

Since that original suit, the landscape has shifted. A hacking incident involving Hugging Face and a series of publicized warnings about catastrophic misalignment risk have pushed AI labs and regulators alike toward talk of slowing down frontier model training. OpenAI itself said Friday it had paused training on its most capable models while it works to confirm safety protocols meant to stop AI agents from reaching the open internet during training.

Florida's new motion argues that pause doesn't go far enough, or come with enough independent oversight. The state points to the Hugging Face breach and separate incidents involving unauthorized attempts to access government servers in Australia and the United States as evidence that OpenAI can't reliably monitor its own systems. The filing also leans on statements from within the AI industry, including OpenAI's own ranks, to argue that even the companies building these systems are signaling they need outside rules imposed on them.