Texas sues OpenAI over ChatGPT and minors: Paxton wants a court-approved evaluator for every new model

Texas has taken the state-by-state fight over chatbot safety to a new place. Attorney General Ken Paxton sued OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, on Friday, October 23, in Collin County District Court, alleging that ChatGPT was sold to Texans as a safe and reliable tool while the company knew it could expose children to serious harm. The 67-page petition is the latest in a wave of state cases against the company — and the first to ask a judge to stand between Texans and every future model OpenAI wants to ship.

That distinction matters. Most state suits so far have aimed at the product already in people's hands: its marketing, its safeguards, its effects on teenagers. Texas wants those things too, but it also wants a permanent checkpoint on what comes next. If a court granted even part of the request, a state judge would gain an unusual say over the release calendar of a frontier AI lab.

What Texas filed#

The petition names six OpenAI entities, from OpenAI Global, LLC to the OpenAI Foundation, and adds Altman as an individual defendant, alleging he personally directed the design, development, safety policies, and deployment of ChatGPT as used in Texas.

The legal hooks are two Texas statutes: the Deceptive Trade Practices–Consumer Protection Act, covering the claim that OpenAI misled consumers about safety and reliability, and the Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment Act (SCOPE Act), governing how digital services handle known minors. The attorney general's public release mentions only the first; the petition invokes both.

What the petition alleges#

At the core of the complaint is an argument about design, not just disclosure. Texas says ChatGPT was built to behave like a confidant — warm, attentive, always available — and that this friendliness is precisely what makes it risky for adolescents who bring it their most frightening problems. The petition's own phrasing, quoted in coverage of the filing, is that the chatbot is designed to act as a friend to encourage use and then betrays vulnerable teenagers to whatever dire needs they bring to it.

On safeguards, the petition draws a sharp line between tiers: the free version of ChatGPT, it says, has no age verification at all, while the paid version asks users for their age but does nothing to verify it. Parental controls added in September 2025 are optional, Texas argues, with notifications to parents only in limited situations — and a Common Sense Media assessment cited in the petition found that ChatGPT for Teens, launched in August, can give parents a false sense of security.

The petition also reaches for the most serious cases in the public record: according to Courthouse News's reporting, it cites at least eight cases of people who committed violent acts after consulting ChatGPT, and points to the OpenAI–Hugging Face security incident in July. The attorney general's release adds sweeping claims of its own — shooters aided, vulnerable people encouraged into suicide, minors addicted to a tool that fakes compassion to collect their data without parental oversight. All of this is Texas's allegation, not a court's finding.

What Texas wants the court to order#

The petition asks the court to temporarily and permanently enjoin fourteen practices. Three stand out:

• No ChatGPT for Texas minors — offering the chatbot to minors in the state, or to children without adequate age verification and parental consent.
• A court-approved gate on new models — releasing any new AI model to Texas users unless an independent third-party evaluator, approved by the court, has reviewed its safety guardrails and approved its release.
• Marketing limits — selling a product that falsely represents itself as having human emotions and characteristics, or that functions unreliably while being marketed as reliable.

On money, Texas seeks civil penalties of $10,000 per alleged violation, plus disgorgement, interest, costs, and attorney fees, with total monetary relief of more than $1 million, and it requests a jury trial. The evaluator remedy is the one to watch: it would convert a consumer-protection case into an ongoing supervisory role for the court over a private company's product pipeline.

OpenAI's response#

OpenAI's public answer, given to the Texas Tribune, does not engage with the petition's specific allegations. A spokesperson said the company has worked with experts to mitigate risks and build additional safeguards, adding that it wants pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire industry, not just one company. In its statement on the eight states' mid-October lawsuits, the company had pointed to parental controls, break reminders, and age-appropriate model protections, while cautioning that no system can be perfect.

For now, the practical effect is nil. Filing a petition asks a court to act; it does not ban ChatGPT for minors, block new models, or impose any penalty. OpenAI will file its formal answer in Collin County, and no hearing date on the requested injunctions has been reported.

Why this suit goes further#

Texas is joining a line that formed fast. Florida sued OpenAI and Altman in June; eight states filed their own suits in mid-October over similar child-safety allegations. Texas shares their theory — that old consumer-protection laws reach new chatbot harms — but adds two escalations: a named chief executive facing personal liability, and a forward-looking release gate that no other state has sought.

Paxton is a repeat player here: in the past year his office has sued or settled with Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, and Roblox over protections for children. There is also a political backdrop, reported by the Texas Tribune: Paxton is the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate, and Elon Musk — who co-founded OpenAI, left in 2018, and now runs rival Grok — has spent nearly $200 million supporting his campaign. None of that decides the legal questions, but it explains why this filing will be read in Washington as well as in Collin County.

What to watch#

Three things will decide whether this case matters beyond its filing week: OpenAI's formal answer in Collin County, and any early challenge to the breadth of the requested injunctions; whether a judge shows appetite for the evaluator remedy, a novel form of ongoing oversight for a frontier lab; and whether other states copy the Texas playbook, which would put a state-by-state legal calendar into every major lab's release planning. The petition is filed; the precedent is not.