WV, other states sue OpenAI, claiming ChatGPT chatbot deceives users, harms children

West Virginia Attorney General JB McCuskey took aim at artificial intelligence developer OpenAI on Wednesday, filing a lawsuit alleging the company’s ChatGPT chatbot program harms young people and deceives the public.

The suit, filed in Mason County Circuit Court, argues that OpenAI violated the West Virginia Consumer Credit and Protection Act by purposely building ChatGPT to be sycophantic and addictive in order to draw in customers and then lying about its safety and privacy features. The suit claims that young children were particularly at risk and that the company knew this and ignored it.

Speaking at a news conference at the Iowa State Capitol in Des Moines on Wednesday, where he stood alongside attorneys general from Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska, McCuskey described AI is an important technology and one that the United States needs to embrace but with guardrails.

While he thinks AI is beneficial for medical progress, military use and other opportunities, “it can’t hurt our children,” McCuskey said. “And what we know is that it does. It is harming our children in real time.”

What is the lawsuit about?

The suit, running more than 100 pages, describes a plan by OpenAI to build a system that draws users in with human-like, agreeable responses in order to “foster dependency” and encourage them to use the platform more.

“ChatGPT also often prompts users to share deeply personal and sensitive information, and OpenAI’s default setting is to collect this data,” the suit alleges. “As a result, through conversations between ChatGPT and West Virginians, OpenAI is collecting, storing, and using the private and sensitive information of West Virginians, including information regarding West Virginians’ health, finances, relationships, and families.”

OpenAI then uses this data to train its models, sell paid subscriptions and tailor advertisements for other products, according to the complaint.

ChatGPT is so sophisticated at mimicking human speech and building relationships, the suit said, that many users, especially young people, “may not fully understand the difference between speaking to a real person and interacting with a computer system.”

The lawsuit also outlined how ChatGPT’s persuasive nature and questionable guidance has had deadly real-world consequences. It pointed to a number of cases in recent years where the chatbot gave wrong medical advice, exacerbated mental health problems and even encouraged users to take their own lives.

In a 2025 case, a California teen died after ChatGPT told him he could mix Xanax with kratom and alcohol. In another instance the same year, ChatGPT encouraged a teen struggling with suicidal thoughts to hide his problems from his parents and even helped him design a sturdier noose, which he eventually used to hang himself.

Despite OpenAI’s claims that the program was safe, the company knew that there were problems, according to the suit, which contends that ChatGPT’s lack of safeguards "reflects a willful disregard for child safety.”

In response to the allegations, an OpenAI spokesperson said that the company has worked to improve its safety systems and introduced new features to protect young people.

“While no system can be perfect, we’ll continue to work with experts to inform our work and build additional safeguards, such as the parental controls, break reminders and age-appropriate model protections that exist today,” the spokesperson said in an email response.

What’s next?

West Virginia joins seven other states — Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Arkansas, Arizona, Idaho and Montana — which have also filed separate lawsuits in their respective state courts. No trial date has been set, but the filing indicates it likely won’t start until at least the first half of 2028.

This is just the latest in a number of ongoing efforts by states, including West Virginia, to pushback on tech companies.

In August, West Virginia was part of a coalition of 47 states that reached a $17 billion settlement with Meta, the company behind social media platforms Instagram and Facebook, over allegations that the company built its platform to be addictive and harmful to young people. West Virginia is set to receive about $114 million as its share of the deal.