Texas sues OpenAI over ChatGPT's lack of digital identity age verification

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman in Collin County District Court, alleging that they designed and maintained a dangerous product and provided inappropriate content to children without age verification. The lawsuit was filed under Texas's DTPA consumer protection law and the SCOPE Act, and asks the court to compel ChatGPT to implement age verification, stop providing services to Texas minors, require court-approved independent third-party evaluation of safety guardrails before new models are released in the state, and seeks $10,000 in civil penalties per violation. The complaint states that the free version of ChatGPT has no age verification mechanism at all and that the paid version only nominally asks for age, that Texas has tens of thousands of users under 13, and it also cites BBC and NPR research and cases of lawyers sanctioned for false citations to question its reliability. OpenAI responded that government has an important role and committed to working with Texas and other states to advance pragmatic AI policy applicable across the industry; previously, in mid-October, eight states had already sued OpenAI.