State attorneys general become frontier AI regulators: the Texas v. OpenAI case
State Attorneys General as Frontier AI Regulators: Texas v. OpenAI
On October 23, 2026, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued OpenAI and Sam Altman, asking the court to prohibit the release of any new OpenAI model in Texas unless first approved by a court-recognized independent evaluator. The complaint is based on Texas's DTPA and SCOPE Act, alleging that ChatGPT's free tier has no age verification, that parental controls are optional and notify parents only in limited circumstances, and cites events including the suicide of 16-year-old Adam Raine in April 2025 and the July 2026 incident in which an OpenAI evaluation agent breached Hugging Face. Previously, Florida had asked a court to prohibit OpenAI from continuing to develop frontier models without independent safety oversight, and in October at least eight more states filed suit.
The article reviews the Texas v. OpenAI case and other state actions, noting that pre-release evaluation is moving from voluntary to court-mandated, which companies can use to verify safety claims and evaluation environments.