Texas Attorney General Sues OpenAI — and Sam Altman Personally — Over ChatGPT and Kids
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed suit against OpenAI on October 23 in a Collin County district court, and did something most state AI litigation so far has avoided: he named Sam Altman personally, not just the company, as a defendant. The complaint argues Altman's own statements and direct involvement in ChatGPT's design make him individually liable alongside OpenAI under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices-Consumer Protection Act.
The suit leans on a familiar prosecutorial move: quoting the executive's own words back at him. It opens by citing a 2015 Altman remark that AI will 'probably most likely lead to the end of the world,' using it to frame a company that, Paxton's office says, chased 'an insatiable quest to win the AI arms race' while leaving basic safeguards for minors unbuilt.
The legal theory is broader than it looks
Beyond the DTPA deception claims, Texas alleges OpenAI violated the state's SCOPE Act — its 2024 children's online-safety law — by failing to verify users' ages, failing to confirm that adults claiming parental authority over a minor's account actually are their parents, and providing inadequate parental controls. The complaint catalogs specific harms it says flowed from those gaps: mass shooters allegedly aided by the chatbot, users allegedly pushed toward suicide, professionals allegedly humiliated by fabricated outputs, and minors allegedly becoming compulsive users whose data was harvested without parental oversight.
What makes the filing notable isn't the harm narrative, which echoes complaints already lodged by other states and by families in wrongful-death suits. It's the remedy. Paxton isn't just asking for an age gate. He wants a court-appointed independent evaluator to review and approve any new OpenAI model before Texans can use it — a standing judicial checkpoint on OpenAI's release cycle that would functionally give a Texas court, mediated through a third-party reviewer, a veto over the company's product roadmap in that state. Civil penalties on top would run $10,000 per violation, a number that scales fast against a product with ChatGPT's user base.
A plaintiff with a complicated backer
Paxton is the Republican nominee for a Texas Senate seat, and the lawsuit arrives amid reporting that Elon Musk — OpenAI's co-founder turned bitter rival and the founder of competing lab xAI — is the single largest donor to Paxton's campaign. Musk's own 2024 suit against OpenAI and Altman, seeking $1.5 billion over the company's shift from its nonprofit roots, was dismissed by a federal judge. Musk's Grok chatbot has drawn its own regulatory scrutiny, including a California attorney general inquiry into deepfake sexual imagery generated by the tool, but Texas has brought no parallel action against xAI. That asymmetry is the obvious question hanging over the filing: whether this is child-safety enforcement, industry rivalry by other means, or some of both.
It also fits a pattern. Paxton has sued or settled with Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, and Roblox over child-safety practices in roughly the past year, making AI chatbots the next predictable target for a state AG who has built a national profile on platform-liability suits ahead of a Senate run.
OpenAI's answer, and the bigger stakes
OpenAI's response was notably conciliatory rather than combative: a spokesperson said the company has worked with outside experts to add safeguards and is 'committed to working with Texas and other states' on AI rules that apply across the industry — language aimed at the patchwork problem every AI company now faces, where a win or loss in one state court risks becoming the template other AGs copy. If a Texas judge grants anything close to the pre-release evaluator requirement, it would hand state regulators a tool federal agencies have so far declined to build: a standing gate on frontier model deployment, enforced not by Congress or the FTC but by a single county court acting on one state's consumer-protection statute.