Florida's attorney general is going further than anyone else in the country on OpenAI, and she's using the phrase "accessory to murder" to do it.
Last week, AG Ashley Moody filed the first state-led lawsuit against OpenAI, built in part around chat logs pulled from the FSU shooter's ChatGPT history. At a press conference, Moody said that if there had been a person on the other side of those conversations, "we would be charging them with accessory to commit murder." Her office is also accusing the company of choosing "the AI race over the safety and security of our kids."
Two days later, a coalition of roughly 42 state attorneys general led by New York's office served OpenAI with a subpoena, according to the New York Times. Florida's lawsuit and the multistate probe are technically separate actions, but they're asking variations of the same question: what is ChatGPT actually doing to the people who use it, and how much of that behavior is by design.
The subpoena itself is unusually specific. The AGs want OpenAI to hand over documents covering:
- Advertising, engagement, and retention metrics, including how the company measures whether users keep coming back.
- How ChatGPT treats minors and older adults inside the product.
- Collection and use of consumer data, including health information shared in conversations.
- Sycophancy and deception, meaning the design choices that make ChatGPT tell users what they want to hear.
That last one is the tell. Regulators usually probe what a company collects, not how it talks. Including sycophancy in a subpoena means AGs are now treating ChatGPT's personality as a regulated product feature, which connects directly to the engagement-harm feedback loop we covered Friday. Florida's civil filing puts it bluntly, arguing that ChatGPT is "designed to act like a friend to encourage use of the chatbot" and then exposes vulnerable users to whatever the model happens to say next.
OpenAI's response has been measured and corporate. A spokesperson told reporters the company is engaging "constructively" with the AGs, and a separate statement to the Times said "none of this changes what families have gone through, but we are committed to learning, improving, and getting this right." Both lines are doing the same job, which is to keep the conversation going without conceding anything that would matter in court.
The timing is what makes this awkward for OpenAI. The company confidentially filed for an IPO earlier this month, with reports putting the potential valuation as high as $300 billion. A 42-state probe and a first-of-its-kind state lawsuit are not the kind of disclosures bankers love to see in an S-1, especially when one of the plaintiffs is publicly comparing your product to an accessory to murder.
The multistate subpoena is the bigger threat here, even though Florida is the louder story. Civil lawsuits get fought in court for years and usually settle quietly. Subpoenas force discovery, and discovery is how the public finds out what OpenAI's internal engagement metrics actually look like, what the company knew about teen users and sycophancy, and when it knew it. If any of that gets unsealed before the IPO prices, that trillion-dollar number starts to look a lot more theoretical. The AGs don't need to win to win. They just need to make the documents public.
