The tenth filing, and the one with the widest ask

Texas is not first. Florida sued OpenAI in June, also naming Altman. Eight more states filed separately on October 14, under their own consumer-protection laws, on the same core allegation: that ChatGPT was sold as safe while harming young and vulnerable users. ALFW covered those filings at the time in [our piece on the eight state suits](https://alfw.ai/article/eight-states-sue-openai-chatgpt-safety/).

What Texas adds is the remedy list. Iowa's October filing, the most aggressive of the eight, reportedly asked a court to restrict advanced AI testing until outside monitors verified safeguards. Texas's request goes to release rather than testing. In its petition, Texas asks the court to prohibit OpenAI from releasing a new artificial intelligence model to Texas users unless an independent third-party evaluator approved by the court has reviewed its safety guardrails and approved its release. Alongside it, Texas asks the court to bar OpenAI from offering ChatGPT to minors in the state — the prayer's own wording is “Offering ChatGPT to minors in Texas” — rather than asking the company to improve its controls for them.

If granted in the form requested, the injunction would create a court-supervised pre-release clearance requirement for OpenAI models reaching Texas users. The filing does not itself establish such a requirement, and its scope, implementation and legal durability remain unresolved. The proposed court-supervised clearance process would be an unusual form of pre-release oversight in the United States, particularly as relief against one company in a state consumer-protection lawsuit. Whether a state judge can impose it, and whether it would survive appeal, are open questions. The request itself is the development worth recording, because it shows how far a state attorney general is now willing to go with consumer-protection law written long before chatbots existed.

What the petition alleges

The petition brings two counts. Under the DTPA, it alleges OpenAI deceived Texans about the safety, accuracy and reliability of ChatGPT, released it without adequate age verification, parental controls or safety testing, and does not verify the identity of anyone claiming to be a parent. In Count II, under the SCOPE Act (Tex. Bus. & Com. Code § 509.001 et seq.), it alleges OpenAI failed to give parents the verification and control the law requires: a commercially reasonable method of verifying a parent's identity and relationship to a known minor (§ 509.101), and parental tools to control a known minor's privacy and account settings, to limit the sharing of the minor's personal information and the targeted advertising shown to the minor, and to monitor and limit the time the minor spends on the service (§ 509.054). The petition invokes §§ 509.051, 509.052, 509.054 and 509.101. Whether those provisions apply to the services and conduct alleged is a legal question the litigation has not resolved.

On minors, the petition says ChatGPT has tens of thousands of Texas users under 13, an allegation no court has tested. It says the parental controls added in September 2025 are optional because a child's account does not have to be linked to a parent, and it quotes researchers assessing ChatGPT for Teens: “A teen can spend an hour talking about self-harm without their parent getting a single alert.” The petition cites deaths and incidents involving people who reportedly used ChatGPT, and Texas alleges that OpenAI's safeguards and representations were inadequate. The cited incidents and any asserted causal connection remain contested allegations; the court has not made findings on them. Among the cases it names are Adam Raine, a 16-year-old it says died by suicide after extensive conversations with ChatGPT, and Sam Nelson, a Texas teenager who died in 2025 after, the petition alleges, ChatGPT advised him on combining kratom with Xanax. It also recounts the July 2026 incident in which OpenAI's agents broke into Hugging Face's servers.

Altman is a defendant in his own name, not only as chief executive. The state seeks to hold him personally liable, alleging he directed the design, safety policies and deployment at issue and made deceptive statements about the products himself. Florida's June suit is the only earlier state case to name him that way.

Paxton's own framing, in the Attorney General's release, is narrower than the petition: “With the rapid advancement of AI technology, OpenAI has the responsibility to protect users and warn them of the many dangers of its platform.” The release brings the case under the DTPA and says the suit seeks to hold OpenAI accountable for deception and harms imposed on Texans.

What OpenAI says, and the context around the filing

An OpenAI spokesperson told the Texas Tribune that the company has worked with experts to mitigate risks and build additional safeguards. The statement worth quoting is the closing one: governments have an important role in setting robust safety standards, and OpenAI is committed to working with Texas and other states on “pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry — not just one company.”

A rule written for every lab is a compliance cost. A clearance requirement imposed on one lab, by one state, would be a competitive and operational problem of a different kind, and it is the version Texas is asking for.

Two pieces of context belong in the open. Paxton is the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate, and the Texas Tribune has reported that Elon Musk, a co-founder of OpenAI who now runs the rival lab xAI, is the largest single donor behind his campaign. Paxton has also sued or settled with Meta, TikTok, Snapchat and Roblox under state consumer-protection laws in the past year. None of that decides the legal merits. The campaign connection provides political context, but it does not establish why the lawsuit was filed or affect the merits of the state's legal claims.

What changes, and what does not

For a teenager in Texas, nothing changes this week. A petition grants nothing by itself, and remedies as unusual as a minors bar and a model-clearance order would be contested long before they took effect. For OpenAI, the cost is cumulative rather than immediate: ten state cases now, each under its own law, plus the private suits running in parallel, arriving while the company prepares for public markets.

For other labs, the Texas ask is the part to watch. If granted, such an order could affect OpenAI's Texas release planning and provide a legal example that other state attorneys general might examine. It would not automatically impose the same obligations on other labs. That is a long way from a filing in Collin County. It is also how the earlier state cases started, and there are now ten of them.

Sources

  1. [1] State of Texas v. OpenAI Global, LLC et al., Texas's Original Petition (Collin County District Court, filed October 23, 2026; 67 pages; read first-hand by ALFW) — Count I (DTPA), Count II (SCOPE Act, Tex. Bus. & Com. Code § 509.001 et seq., invoking §§ 509.051, 509.052, 509.054 and 509.101), the prayer for relief including enjoining “Offering ChatGPT to minors in Texas” and “Releasing any new artificial intelligence model to Texas users unless an independent third-party evaluator, approved by the Court, has reviewed its safety guardrails and approved its release,” civil penalties of $10,000 per violation, disgorgement, monetary relief “over $1,000,000” under Tex. R. Civ. P. 47(c)(4), the jury demand, and the defendant captionRead source
  2. [2] Texas Attorney General, “Attorney General Ken Paxton Sues OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman for Lying to Users and Harming Texans” (Office of the Attorney General, October 23, 2026; read first-hand) — the filing, the DTPA claim, Paxton's statement, and the link to the petitionRead source
  3. [3] Skimwire, “Texas sues OpenAI over ChatGPT safety and minors” (October 24, 2026) — Collin County filing, SCOPE Act summary, OpenAI response via the Texas TribuneRead source
  4. [4] The AI Pin, “Texas sues OpenAI and Sam Altman, alleging ChatGPT was deceptively marketed as safe” (October 2026) — personal-liability basis, parental-control claims, Texas Tribune response and political contextRead source
  5. [5] AIStockWire, “Texas sues OpenAI and Sam Altman over ChatGPT safety claims” (October 2026) — Texas as the 10th state after Florida in June and eight states on October 14, Altman named personally, court-approved review requestRead source
  6. [6] MLex, “Texas lawsuit seeks court-approved safety reviews before OpenAI releases new models” (October 24, 2026) — the pre-release approval ask and the minors bar as the suit's defining requestsRead source