Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier has asked a state court to bar OpenAI from developing new artificial intelligence models until independent third parties have approved its safety guardrails. The motion, filed September 28, sits inside the state’s lawsuit against the company and Chief Executive Sam Altman, and it goes well beyond model development: it also asks the judge to keep ChatGPT away from Florida minors.
Nothing has been ordered yet. The request is for a temporary injunction, a court-imposed pause that would last while the underlying case proceeds, and no hearing date had been reported as of the filing. OpenAI has already answered in public, calling ChatGPT a general-purpose tool used for legitimate purposes by hundreds of millions of people.
Six restrictions, with model development first
The motion, filed in the Circuit Court of the Tenth Judicial Circuit in Highlands County, lists six specific injunctions in the state’s own filing. The first would prohibit OpenAI from developing AI models without independent third-party guardrails and approval, which is the request behind the stop-new-models framing. The others would bar offering ChatGPT to minors in Florida, block collecting data from children under 13 without verifiable parental consent, ban misrepresenting ChatGPT’s safety, reliability and accuracy, ban presenting it as having human attributes or emotions, and prohibit design features that keep users talking to prolong engagement.
The wording matters, because the first item is conditional. It does not ask the court to end OpenAI’s research outright; it asks that no new model be built unless an outside body signs off. The defendants named in the caption include OpenAI Global, LLC, the OpenAI Foundation, OpenAI OpCo, LLC, OpenAI Group PBC, OpenAI Holdings, LLC, and Altman personally.
Uthmeier announced the filing in a news release from the Attorney General’s office, and his three-line summary of the case was widely repeated: “Stop calling it safe. Stop pretending it’s human. Stop selling it to kids.” One legal-tracking site also pulled the filing’s description of AI as “perhaps the greatest nuisance that mankind has ever created” and its claim that disaster has been avoided only through fortunate circumstances. Engadget quoted a shorter version of the same demand, “No new model development without independent safety guardrails,” along with a request that the court “protect Florida families.”
A June lawsuit, a federal detour and a new motion
The injunction request is an escalation of a case Florida filed on June 1, 2026. News4Jax reported that the suit alleges violations of Florida’s Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act, along with negligence, gross negligence, defective design, failure to warn, fraudulent misrepresentation and public nuisance. The motion rests on the same deceptive-practices statute, on the public nuisance doctrine and on the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.
The case has already had one procedural fight. According to The Next Web, OpenAI moved the lawsuit into federal court and a judge sent it back to state court this month. Engadget traced the state’s interest to a criminal investigation opened in April 2025 after a mass shooting at Florida State University, where the suspect allegedly used ChatGPT in the lead-up to the attack. News4Jax noted that discovery had not begun when the motion was filed.
The safety evidence, and OpenAI’s own words used against it
The filing leans on the company’s own statements. The state quotes Altman telling the UN Security Council that AI developers should not train models unless they can make “an extremely strong case” that the models can be kept “under human control.” It also cites the observation that “no individual actor is willing to stop unilaterally,” and a warning from OpenAI’s chief scientist that “this is a time that calls for extreme caution.”
The motion also points to security incidents involving autonomous AI agents. Axios listed the Hugging Face hack, attempted breaches of American government websites and unauthorized access to an Australian health database, and reported that the filing cites earlier reporting on tens of thousands of security incidents under investigation at AI labs. Uthmeier added a direct challenge to the company’s chief executive: Axios quoted him saying that if Altman meant what he said about slowing down, Altman could join the state’s request. The filing cites Altman’s public calls for slowing AI development as support for the injunction, according to Engadget.
OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri said the public wants assurance that AI is being developed safely and that this begins with what the companies themselves do. The company’s statement to Engadget added: “ChatGPT is a general-purpose tool used by hundreds of millions of people every day for legitimate purposes.” The Next Web reported that OpenAI prefers industry-wide rules to action aimed at a single company. Whether a Highlands County judge will set a hearing on a pause that would reach every future OpenAI model is the open question in the case.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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