Arizona Attorney General (AG) Kris Mayes has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, the company that owns and operates ChatGPT, for allegedly misleading customers about its nature.
The Suit
In her lawsuit, AG Mayes claims that OpenAI violated the Arizona Consumer Fraud Act by failing to disclose that ChatGPT's features make the chatbot dangerously agreeable and sycophantic in order to keep people, including minors, on the platform.
ChatGPT 4o, an earlier model of the chatbot, gained infamy for these qualities, to the point of dangerously enabling delusions and destructive ideas.
AG Mayes' press release pins this failure on OpenAI's rush to make ChatGPT the first mainstream chatbot.
What Mayes is Saying
"OpenAI designed a product to attract young users and keep them engaged for as long as possible so it could capture their extensive personal data for the company's commercial benefit," the Arizona Attorney General said through her press release. "Open AI put Arizonans safety at risk by failing to implement adequate user protections or transparency measures, despite clear indications that minors were regularly interacting with its chatbot. We're suing OpenAI to protect Arizona children and to hold the company accountable for its repeated violations of Arizona law."
Arizona vs Chatbots
Last August, Senator Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) led a bipartisan letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, voicing concerns about reports that artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots are engaging in inappropriate conversations with minors.
More recently, Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) introduced his Senior Chatbot Protection Act in July, which requires companies to more clearly tell users they are talking to an AI, not a living person or licensed professional, especially when conversations involve topics such as health care, estate planning, guardianship, or a crisis, so that the chatbot would provide additional warnings.
Suing TikTok
Last week, Mayes filed a similar suit against the short-form video social media giant TikTok for similar alleged violations of the Arizona Consumer Fraud Act, commenting, "TikTok touts its supposed safety measures to convince parents that this product is safe for young people. But behind the company's marketing is a platform engineered to exploit the vulnerabilities of developing brains, pushing Arizona kids toward compulsive use, harmful content, and dangerous behaviors while failing to protect them from adults who use the social media platform to groom or solicit minors. It's unconscionable."
