Texas Sues OpenAI to Bar ChatGPT for Minors

AUSTIN, Tex., Oct. 23 — TexasTexas sued OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, on Friday, asking a state court to bar ChatGPT for minors in Texas and to keep any new OpenAI model from Texans until an independent evaluator approved by the court has reviewed its safety guardrails and approved its release. Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general, filed the 67-page petition in district court in Collin County, accusing them of “unlawfully deceiving Texans about the safety, accuracy, and reliability of their products.”

It brings claims under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices–Consumer Protection Act and the state’s SCOPE Act, which protects users under 18, and asks for civil penalties of $10,000 for each violation, the disgorgement of the defendants’ assets and a jury trial.The SCOPE ActThe Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment Act requires services to give a verified parent tools to supervise a known minor’s use, the petition says; it alleges that OpenAI neither verifies parents nor provides the tools. A violation counts as a deceptive practice under the trade-practices law. The defendants are Mr. Altman and six OpenAI entities.

The petition opens with a line it attributes to Mr. Altman: “AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies.” Its source is a Future of Life Institute post of June 6, 2015, the year OpenAI was founded.The QuoteThe post says Mr. Altman, then head of Y Combinator, said it in an interview at Airbnb’s Open Air 2015 conference, and quotes it from Business Insider. The same post quotes him as saying that if he were President Obama he “would commit maybe $100 billion to R&D of AI safety initiatives.” Under an image of a ChatGPT web page headed “Built with safety in mind,” the petition then answers: “Not so.”

Most of the 14 practices it asks the court to forbid, temporarily and permanently, concern how ChatGPT is built and offered, including “Offering ChatGPT to minors in Texas.” One reaches further: OpenAI would be barred from releasing “any new artificial intelligence model to Texas users unless an independent third-party evaluator, approved by the Court, has reviewed its safety guardrails and approved its release.” If granted, that would give a court-approved evaluator the last word on OpenAI’s launches in Texas.

The petition alleges that ChatGPT has millions of users in Texas, including “tens of thousands” under 13, and that its free version “has no gatekeeping or age verification mechanism whatsoever.” It says OpenAI “nominally created some parental controls” in September 2025 and launched ChatGPT for Teens in August 2026, but does not require children’s accounts to be linked to a parent’s. OpenAI’s help pages say ChatGPT for Teens is enabled automatically on eligible accounts when the age a user gives, a verified age or its age prediction “indicates you are under 18,” and that parents “can optionally link accounts” to manage selected settings. Because of the defendants’ misrepresentations, the petition says, “vulnerable people have been encouraged into suicide.” It seeks to hold Mr. Altman personally liable.

“With the rapid advancement of AI technology, OpenAI has the responsibility to protect users and warn them of the many dangers of its platform,” Mr. Paxton said in a statement. “I will fight to protect Texans from the harms of AI and ensure that powerful technology companies are not above the law.”

“Governments have an important role to play in setting robust safety standards for AI, and we’re committed to working with Texas and other states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry — not just one company,” an OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement published by The Texas Tribune. The spokesperson said the company had worked with experts to mitigate risks and build additional safeguards, the Tribune reported.

Eight other states — Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska and West Virginia — had sued OpenAI in their own courts by Oct. 14, according to the attorneys general of Iowa and Nebraska, who accused it of deceiving parents about ChatGPT’s safety. Mr. Paxton is running for the U.S. Senate, and the Tribune noted that Elon Musk — who helped found OpenAI, left it in 2018 and later started his own company, xAI — is “the largest single donor behind Paxton’s Senate campaign.” The Tribune has reported that his money went to the Senate Republicans’ main super PAC, which put it into a new super PAC backing Mr. Paxton.

The state’s outside lawyers include Ashley Keller of Keller Postman and Anthony G. Buzbee, who the Tribune noted was Mr. Paxton’s lawyer during his 2023 impeachment proceedings. The petition says Texas brings the case “exclusively under Texas law” and disclaims any federal claim. Neither it nor Mr. Paxton’s release gives a date for a hearing. Next to watch: whether OpenAI seeks to move the case to federal court, and when a judge hears the state’s request for a temporary injunction.

Daily Cortex is written with AI models, including Anthropic’s Claude, and fact-checked with OpenAI’s GPT models.