Florida's James Uthmeier seeks temporary injunction against OpenAI

The injunction request is the latest step in a legal fight that began four months earlier, when Uthmeier brought what he describes as the first state-led lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman over the release of ChatGPT. The new filing leans heavily on the company's own admissions, as quoted by the attorney general: that it provides its service without fully understanding how it works, that the service poses a threat to humanity's very survival, and that it cannot stop building it unless government forces it to — which he characterizes as a plea to be tied to the mast.

In the filing, Uthmeier frames the injunction as a response to that plea, saying he is answering the defendants' cry for help as Florida's attorney general and asking them to stop harming Floridians with what he calls a reckless and unacceptably risky product. He warns that the harm is an imminent reality and will become irreversible unless the court orders a stop during the trial. Whether the court grants the request is likely to turn on whether it accepts that characterization of the risk and of the defendants' own statements.