Bipartisan coalition of states sues OpenAI over user safety - Politico

Good news for federalism: the states have finally found a defendant everyone can agree on. A bipartisan coalition of attorneys general is suing OpenAI over user safety, filed in state courts — which is the legal equivalent of picking the venue with the shorter queue and the more photogenic press conference. The allegation, per Politico, is that OpenAI's lack of safeguards encouraged self-harm among users. Regular readers will recognise this beat: we flagged the state lawmakers poking at chatbot attachment and mental health. Now the lawyers have turned up, which is what happens when the hearings end and nobody has actually passed anything.

The excerpt names exactly one human, and she earns the billing. Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird says "OpenAI claims ChatGPT is safe while it's giving dangerous medical advice, encouraging people to hurt others and coaching people to commit suicide — all while pretending to be their fake friend." That final clause is a masterpiece. "Pretending to be their fake friend" is either a damning regulatory finding or the most ruthlessly honest product description in the history of Silicon Valley marketing, and quite possibly both. Somewhere, a brand strategist is reading it and taking notes.

What is notable is the venue. Not a federal agency, not a statute, not a rulemaking with a comment period and a sandwich — state courts, state AGs, the oldest fallback in the book. Two decades of "we support thoughtful regulation" from the industry has produced exactly this: a patchwork of attorneys general doing the regulating by subpoena, one headline at a time. The bipartisan framing is doing its own heavy lifting: a coalition in which everyone agrees is a coalition that has run out of other things to disagree about. The remedy, presumably, will be a settlement, a safety page, and a blog post about how much OpenAI cares — the important thing is that someone, somewhere, filed something.