With a blistering lawsuit filed Monday, the state of Florida may succeed where Elon Musk failed in bringing OpenAI and Sam Altman to heel.

“Today, we announced the first-in-the-nation state-led lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman,” Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier said this morning after filing an 83-page complaint in the Sunshine State’s 10th Judicial Circuit.

“Defendants each owed the State a duty to exercise reasonable care when designing, marketing, selling, promoting, and/or distributing ChatGPT, including to take all reasonable precautions in ensuring it was safe for use,” the filing against OpenAI’s corporate entities and Altman proclaims. “Defendants owed a heightened duty of care to the State because of the great danger of addiction, cognitive decline, suicide, violence, and related harms in Florida from their designing, marketing, selling, promoting, and/or distributing ChatGPT.”

To that, the filing seeks injunctions, a halt to data collection from minors and new guardrails galore, plus potentially millions in penalties for violations of the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act. Heading towards the fall midterms where Big Tech has become a top topic, the action comes in the aftermath of confirmed ChatGPT-consulted shootings that killed two at Florida State University in 2025, and the death of two University of South Florida graduate students this year.

“OpenAI and Altman ignored internal and external safety warnings, put children at great risk, and allowed a dangerous product to reach millions of Floridians,” Uthmeier added at the press conference. The Republican, running for a full term as Florida AG in November, opened a separate and ongoing criminal probe into OpenAI in April.

Today’s suit and the criminal investigation launched this spring represented a rare break by outgoing Gov. Ron DeSantis and MAGA loyalist Uthmeier with the much more lackadaisical approach of Donald Trump when it comes to tech regulation. For the record: OpenAI’s Altman personally donated $1 million to Trump’s 2025 inauguration. The CEO was in attendance at the White House soon afterwards joining Oracle boss (and Paramount chief David Ellison’s papa) Larry Ellison for the unveiling of the $500 billion Stargate AI initiative.

Last month, with a bevy of CEOs in Washington, D.C., Trump canceled under pressure from Silicon Valley an Executive Order signing and ceremony on a federal AI safety vetting program. Picking up which way the political and AI winds are blowing, Golden State Gov. Gavin Newsom inked his own EO on AI job displacement on May 21, the day of Trump’s delayed EO.

More than anything, and politics aside as much as they can be in America today, Uthmeier’s suit does what Trump’s paused EO was to do and puts consumer protections at the fore.

“Because of Defendants’ misrepresentations about ChatGPT and their careless introduction of ChatGPT to Florida and the world, mass shooters have been aided and abetted in deadly rampages, vulnerable people have been encouraged into suicide, professionals have suffered public humiliation, users have lost critical thinking skills, and minors have become addicted to a tool that feigns human compassion to collect their data with no parental oversight,” the filing says of the Hollywood-flirting OpenAI. “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.”

In that context, as the AI backlash intensifies, Florida’s suit sounds like something one could imagine being filed in big Blue States like California, where AG Rob Bonta (who approved a for-profit restructuring of the IPO-eager OpenAI last year) launched a deep look into sexfakes of children and women created by Musk’s Grok. Florida’s move to name Altman directly plays into the personality cult many a techlord have fostered to varying degrees with their army of flacks and acting coaches.

The suit today “seeks to hold Altman personally liable for the harm he has caused Floridians through his reckless and willful conduct as founder and CEO of OpenAI, including his utter disregard for the risk to human life caused by his firms’ conduct.”

Reps for OpenAI and Altman did not respond to Deadline’s request for comment on the Florida action. The success that OpenAI, Altman and Google had last month, with a jury rejecting co-founder Elon Musk’s $150 billion suit over the former nonprofit becoming a for-profit company, has set the stage for OpenAI going public in what some estimate as a trillion-dollar IPO. Musk has promised to appeal the Oakland jury decision.

No date for an OpenAI IPO has been set, but today’s suit may have put a stink on it, for now.