OpenAI was served a subpoena on Friday from a coalition of 42 US state attorneys general seeking documents relating to its business practices and effect on users, according to the Wall Street Journal, whose parent company, NewsCorp, has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.
The newspaper viewed the subpoena sent by the New York attorney general's office detailing the information being sought from OpenAI. The documents being subpoenaed cover a wide range of the company's activities, "including advertising, user engagement and retention, handling of consumer data and health data, activities related to minors and seniors, deep learning models, model sycophancy and company policies," according to the report.
OpenAI responded to the legal action by releasing a statement to the media.
"AI is a new and powerful technology, and we work every day to safely bring its benefits to people in a responsible way," said a company spokesperson. "We take the concerns raised by state attorneys general seriously and intend to engage constructively with their offices."
Knowingly selling unsafe product, ignoring warnings
Florida became the first state to file a lawsuit against OpenAI and its chief executive officer, Sam Altman, earlier this month. The suit claims that OpenAI and Altman "knowingly released an unsafe product and ignored warnings that it could harm users."
Florida’s attorney general's office in April began a criminal investigation into OpenAI regarding the role the company's chatbot played in a mass shooting that killed two people at Florida State University last year.
According to the investigation, the suspect allegedly turned to OpenAI's ChatGPT feature as a confidant and sounding board to plan the attack, and the chatbot allegedly gave the suspect advice on what to do.
OpenAI is not the only artificial intelligence company being investigated. According to the report, the 42 state attorneys general sent a letter to OpenAI and its competitors, Meta, Anthropic, Alphabet’s Google and xAI, addressing their concerns.
Protecting vulnerable users from harmful interactions
The coalition "demanded safeguards to protect vulnerable users from harmful interactions with chatbots, warning that 'developers may be held accountable for the outputs of their GenAI products' for 'encouraging an individual to commit a criminal act,'" according to the Wall Street Journal.
California's attorney general's office in January announced an investigation into the large-scale production of sexual images of women and children created using xAI’s Grok chatbot. The explicit material has allegedly been used to harass people across Elon Musk’s social-media platform, X.
X and Grok are part of Musk's SpaceX, which held an initial public offering (IPO) on Friday.
OpenAI confidentially filed IPO paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this month.
