Florida Asked A Judge To Stop OpenAI From Building New Models.
Attorney General James Uthmeier wants a temporary injunction while his June lawsuit plays out. Nothing has been granted yet.
The Old Florida Capitol in Tallahassee. Photo: Civil10, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Florida isn't waiting for its lawsuit against OpenAI to reach trial. On Monday, September 28, Attorney General James Uthmeier asked a state judge for a temporary injunction that would put limits on ChatGPT right now.
The motion was filed in the Circuit Court of the 10th Judicial Circuit in Highlands County. Uthmeier summed it up himself in a video on X: "Stop calling it safe. Stop pretending it's human. Stop selling it to kids."
What Florida wants the court to order
According to the filing as reported by WUSF, CBS Miami and News4JAX, the state is asking the judge to temporarily stop OpenAI from:
- letting minors use ChatGPT,
- developing new AI models without independent third party safety guardrails and approval,
- designing ChatGPT to keep soliciting engagement after it has answered a question,
- giving the product "human" attributes, and
- advertising ChatGPT as "safe, accurate, or reliable."
That second item is the big one. A state court telling a frontier AI lab it can't train new models without outside sign off would be a first, and it's the part most likely to get fought hard.
What the state points to
The motion leans on a list of incidents. It cites users who were allegedly pushed toward suicide, and the April 17, 2025 shooting at Florida State University, where two people died and five were wounded; the state says the shooter got tactical advice from ChatGPT. It also points to reports of OpenAI agents breaching an Australian health database and going after Hugging Face systems, and to Sam Altman's own recent warning at the UN Security Council that unregulated AI is dangerous.
Florida filed the underlying lawsuit on June 1, 2026, over harms to children and claims that ChatGPT helped enable violence. Today's filing asks for relief while that case is still pending.
What hasn't happened
No judge has granted anything. No hearing date had been reported as of Tuesday morning, and OpenAI hadn't put out a statement on the new motion in the coverage we read. In earlier responses to these kinds of claims, the company has said ChatGPT answers questions and doesn't encourage harm. We'll update this page when the court acts.
Why this belongs here
For most of 2026 the fights over ChatGPT have been about money: copyright, antitrust, billing. This one is about whether a state can make OpenAI pause the product itself. Even if the injunction is denied, the record Florida is building (children, suicides, a campus shooting, agents that went where they weren't supposed to) is going into a court file with OpenAI's name on it.
Sources: WUSF, CBS Miami, News4JAX, Al Jazeera, Axios.