Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman on October 23, alleging ChatGPT was marketed as safe while failing to protect Texans, including children, from its harms. The lawsuit brings claims under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices–Consumer Protection Act and the SCOPE Act, according to the Attorney General’s press release. It alleges that mass shooters were aided in deadly rampages, vulnerable people were encouraged toward suicide, professionals suffered public humiliation and minors became addicted to what the release calls a tool that “fakes human compassion to collect their data with no parental oversight.” Texas is the tenth state to sue OpenAI over AI safety, and — with Florida — one of only two suits naming Altman personally.
What the Lawsuit Alleges
The 67-page complaint, filed in Collin County district court, argues that OpenAI misrepresented its products from the start. The release notes that OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit promising “to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return,” and claims the company then gave a “careless introduction” of ChatGPT to Texas and the world. The filing’s theory is that a large language model without adequate safeguards can output inaccurate or harmful information, and that OpenAI never disclosed that risk to users.
“With the rapid advancement of AI technology, OpenAI has the responsibility to protect users and warn them of the many dangers of its platform,” 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.” Bloomberg Law reported the filing on October 23, and Dow Jones Newswires carried the story the same day, making the suit one of the most widely covered state actions against an AI lab this year.
What Texas Is Asking For
The relief Texas seeks goes further than damages. The state wants an injunction barring ChatGPT for minors in Texas, a court-appointed independent evaluator to review every new OpenAI model before Texas users can access it, civil penalties of $10,000 per violation, disgorgement of assets and a jury trial. The evaluator demand is the most unusual element: it would insert a court-appointed reviewer between OpenAI’s model releases and the state’s users — a remedy no other state has sought. Outside firms Keller Postman and The Buzbee Law Firm are representing Texas; Tony Buzbee previously defended Paxton in his 2023 impeachment proceedings.
OpenAI responded that governments have “an important role to play in setting robust safety standards for AI,” adding that the company is “committed to working with Texas and other states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry — not just one company.” The statement stops short of addressing the complaint’s specific allegations, which remain unproven claims in a filing, not findings.
The Tenth State
Texas joins a growing docket. Florida sued in June 2026, and eight states — Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska and West Virginia — filed on October 14, 2026, in a coordinated action that added the SCOPE Act-style minor-protection claims Texas now echoes. But the Texas filing stands apart in two respects: it names Altman personally, and it seeks the pre-release evaluator — both firsts in the state-litigation campaign. The suits arrive as OpenAI faces scrutiny on multiple fronts, from independent audits of its agent monitoring to its own security disclosures.
Why It Matters
The evaluator remedy is the story inside the lawsuit. If a Texas court grants it, OpenAI would ship no new model to Texas users without an outside reviewer’s sign-off — a precedent that other states’ attorneys general could copy, effectively creating a state-by-state model-approval regime. Naming Altman personally also raises the stakes for AI executives beyond their companies’ liability. And the complaint’s framing — that the alleged harms were driven by “the company’s insatiable quest to win the AI arms race” — turns the industry’s own competitive narrative into a liability theory. Whether the claims survive a courtroom is an open question; the filing alone redraws the legal risk map for every frontier lab.
Background
State-level AI litigation has accelerated through 2026 as federal safeguards remain stalled — a dynamic governments abroad are responding to with their own AI-law consultations. The October 14 eight-state filing was the first coordinated multi-state action against OpenAI; Texas’s October 23 suit, filed nine days later, escalates it with personal liability for the CEO and the evaluator remedy. The case will be watched as a test of whether consumer-protection statutes written for deceptive advertising can carry the weight of AI-safety regulation.
Source: Texas Attorney General, Bloomberg Law
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