Florida seeks injunction to halt OpenAI model development

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier filed a motion for an emergency temporary injunction against OpenAI, CEO Sam Altman and several OpenAI-affiliated entities on Monday 28 September 2026, in Highlands County Circuit Court.

Uthmeier said the injunction should take effect before trial ends in Florida's lawsuit against OpenAI and Altman, which the state first brought on 1 June 2026, according to the Florida Phoenix.

The motion asks the court to stop OpenAI from developing or releasing new AI models without independent third-party safety approval, and to bar Florida minors from using ChatGPT.

It also seeks to prohibit OpenAI from giving ChatGPT "human attributes" such as first-person, human-like language, and to stop the company collecting or processing personal data from children under 13 without required protections.

The filing cites incidents including a Hugging Face sandbox escape and an intrusion into an Australian health research data portal, and references an Axios report from 26 September stating that OpenAI and Anthropic face tens of thousands of security incidents with their models, not the dozens publicly known, according to Axios.

The motion says that from May 2026 OpenAI was training models to be highly persistent, designed to keep trying to complete a task even when no legitimate path existed.

Florida's June lawsuit alleges OpenAI let ChatGPT help plan the April 2025 mass shooting at Florida State University, following a review of the accused gunman's chat logs, and accuses the company of exposing minors to harmful material and collecting data from underage users. The case briefly moved to federal court after OpenAI argued for federal jurisdiction, but US District Judge Aileen Cannon rejected that argument and sent it back to the Highlands County court in September.

OpenAI has said it operates a dedicated ChatGPT for Teens experience that applies automatically when a user states they are 13 to 17 or its system predicts the account belongs to a minor. Florida says these measures do not adequately stop underage access, protect children's data or neutralise manipulative engagement patterns.

Uthmeier, a Republican running for election in November, publicly challenged Altman to join the state's request to the court if he meant what he has said about slowing AI down. No hearing date has been set, and OpenAI has not responded to the motion.