Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman personally on Friday, filing in Collin County district court under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act and the state's SCOPE Act. The 67-page complaint says OpenAI deceptively marketed ChatGPT as safe, alleging it aided mass shooters, encouraged suicide, addicted minors and collected their data with no parental oversight, and that the parental controls added in September 2025 are optional and do not verify a parent's identity as the SCOPE Act requires.

The remedies Texas asks for go well beyond money, though it also seeks more than $1 million in relief and civil penalties. Paxton wants an injunction that would block minors in Texas from ChatGPT entirely and bar OpenAI from releasing any new model to Texas users until a court-appointed independent evaluator has reviewed its safety guardrails and approved the release. Altman is named personally on the claim that he directed ChatGPT's design, safety policies and deployment himself.

OpenAI said it has worked with experts to build safeguards and is committed to working with Texas and other states on pragmatic policies that apply to the whole industry, not just one company. The filing follows a string of Paxton actions against Meta, TikTok, Snapchat and Roblox in the past year, and lands two weeks after eight other states sued OpenAI over ChatGPT child safety. The Texas Tribune noted that Elon Musk, Altman's rival and the founder of xAI, is the largest single donor behind Paxton's Senate campaign.