‘People are getting hurt’: OpenAI sued by Florida over alleged safety risks - Los Angeles Times

Florida, the state that brought you the 'Don't Say Gay' bill and a governor who feuded with Disney over mice, has decided that AI safety is its next crusade. It's suing OpenAI and Sam Altman, alleging that the company knew its chatbot could be weaponized for suicide and shootings but told everyone it was perfectly safe anyway. 'People are getting hurt,' the complaint says, as if we needed a lawsuit from the Sunshine State to state the bleeding obvious. The first state-level AI safety lawsuit in American history — and it took the place that gave us the 'Florida Man' meme to actually do something.

The complaint reportedly cites multiple incidents where individuals used ChatGPT to plan self-harm or violence, including a shooting. Because, of course, it did. Who could have predicted that a system designed to generate plausible-sounding text, deployed to hundreds of millions with zero runtime monitoring, might be used for bad things? Certainly not the company that spent the last two years gaslighting everyone about 'alignment' and 'safety culture' while shipping products faster than they could recall. Florida's attorney general is now the unlikely hero in this farce — a state that has historically struggled with everything from hurricane preparedness to ‘did a meth lab explode here?’ is now our AI safety champion.

OpenAI will almost certainly argue that the platform is a tool, not a weapon, but that ignores the deeply cynical way they've structured terms of service: ‘we can use your data; you can't hold us liable.’ The lawsuit is a signal that the regulatory gap we've been pointing out is now wide enough to drive an actual, literal car through — and that car might be a TikTok-fueled state official looking to make a name. Expect a settlement, some minor policy tweaks, and lots of ‘we take safety seriously’ press releases. Because that's how the game is played: suicides and shootings become bargaining chips.