Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is at it again with calls for age verification digital ID checks, this time suing OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman in a district court over the way the company’s chatbot is designed and functions.
The lawsuit, filed in Collin County on Friday, wants the court to issue an injunction that would force OpenAI to implement age verification on ChatGPT users.
According to the petition, OpenAI is accused of “designing, offering, and maintaining a dangerous product that provides content unsuitable for children without requiring any age verification.”
The claims against OpenAI and Altman are made under the Deceptive Trade Practices-Consumer Protection Act (DTPA) and the SCOPE Act.
The petition asks the court to order OpenAI to stop “Offering ChatGPT to minors in Texas” and to stop running the product “without requiring adequate age verification” and “without parental consent.”
Another order Texas wants is to prevent OpenAI from releasing any new model to its users in that state “unless an independent third-party evaluator, approved by the Court, has reviewed its safety guardrails and approved its release.”
Texas also wants a court order stopping OpenAI from selling a product “that functions unreliably while falsely representing that reliability.”
As for monetary compensation, Texas wants $10,000 in civil penalties for each violation, disgorgement of the company’s assets, attorneys’ fees and costs, and is asking for a jury trial.
The petition states that “The free version of ChatGPT has no gatekeeping or age verification mechanism whatsoever.” The paid tier, it continues, “nominally asks users to provide their age” but “there is no mechanism to verify the age of its users.”
According to the filing, ChatGPT has “tens of thousands of users who are under 13 years of age” in Texas, and it cites a Common Sense Media line that “ChatGPT should be for adults only.”
