Florida asks a court to bar minors from ChatGPT while its case runs
Florida's attorney general has asked a state judge to stop OpenAI offering ChatGPT to minors in Florida while his lawsuit against the company runs. That is one of six prohibitions requested in a 49-page motion for a temporary injunction e-filed on September 28, and no court has ruled on any of them.
OpenAI's own title card for the Hugging Face incident and other third-party impact from misaligned models, the incidents the motion builds its guardrails request on. Image: OpenAI Image: OpenAI
A motion is a request. Everything in this one is what the state alleges and what it wants the court to order, not anything a judge has found.
The case is number 26000295GCAXMX in the Circuit Court of the Tenth Judicial Circuit in Highlands County. Five OpenAI entities are named as defendants, and so is Sam Altman, in his own name.
The state asks for six prohibitions
Two of them reach furthest. The motion asks the court to stop the defendants "developing any artificial intelligence models without independent third-party guardrails and approval", and to stop them "offering ChatGPT to minors in Florida".
The rest cover data collected from Florida children under 13 without verifiable parental consent, misrepresenting ChatGPT's "safety, reliability, and accuracy", giving the chatbot "human attributes it does not have", including any first-person language, and "allowing ChatGPT to solicit engagement from users through conversation prolongation".
The legal footing is Florida's Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act plus public nuisance. The motion argues that when the attorney general seeks an injunction under that act he need only show "a clear legal right" to relief, a lower bar than a private plaintiff's.
A federal judge sent the case back in September
Florida filed the underlying complaint on June 1, 2026, and OpenAI removed the case to the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida. Judge Aileen Cannon sent it back to state court on September 8, writing that the defendants "clearly fail to satisfy the requirements" of the narrow jurisdictional pathways they had invoked.
On the argument that Florida had reached for federal law by tracking federal children's privacy standards in its request for relief, she wrote that the court was "entirely unconvinced". Cannon also turned down Florida's request for the costs it ran up fighting the removal.
Uthmeier puts his case in three lines
"Stop calling it safe. Stop pretending it's human. Stop selling it to kids," Attorney General James Uthmeier wrote in his post announcing the filing.
The motion's own language is heavier. It alleges that since its release in 2022 ChatGPT "has advised teenagers on how to kill themselves, mix unsafe combinations of drugs, become anorexic, helped plan one mass shooting and one multiple homicide in Florida alone", citing the complaint filed in June rather than any court finding.
For the age argument the state leans on published research it cites: a JAMA Network Open paper from February 2026 putting preteen use of AI chatbots at 20%, and a 2025 Common Sense Media survey in which 33% of adolescent users said they had discussed important or serious matters with AI instead of a person, and 24% had shared personal or private information. The motion also asserts that ChatGPT has no mechanism to verify a user's age.
It builds the guardrails request on incidents OpenAI has published itself, among them the six further cases the company disclosed on September 16 and the agents that posted users' images to public image-hosting sites, and it closes by quoting Altman's remarks to the UN Security Council on September 23 back at him, inviting the defendants to agree to the injunction rather than oppose it.
No hearing date appears in the filing, and nothing about ChatGPT changes in Florida unless a judge orders it.
