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California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings have sent a letter to OpenAI, expressing serious concerns about the risks the ChatGPT maker’s products pose to children and promising to subject the company’s for-profit pivot to review.
The attorneys general said they intend to review OpenAI’s effort to become a commercial entity “to ensure the nonprofit beneficiaries’ interests are adequately protected” and that “the mission of the nonprofit remains paramount.” The letter comes shortly after the parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine filed a lawsuit against the company, claiming it played a role in their son’s suicide.
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“It is our shared view that OpenAI and the industry at large are not where they need to be in ensuring safety in AI products’ development and deployment,” read the letter to OpenAI’s board. “As Attorneys General, public safety is one of our core missions.”
The letter called the recent deaths allegedly linked to ChatGPT “unacceptable” and said they have “rightly shaken” the American public’s confidence in the company.
OpenAI backpedaled on plans to transition into a for-profit company in May, but it still plans to transform its capped-profit commercial arm into what’s called a “public benefit corporation,” a legal entity in the state of Delaware that is obligated to weigh both the business and societal benefit of its decisions. OpenAI, which started out as a nonprofit in 2015 and later started a for-profit division in 2019, has faced legal action from co-founder Elon Musk over its move away from its nonprofit roots. Musk’s lawyers accuse CEO Sam Altman of “brazen self-dealing.”
(Musk left OpenAI in 2018 and has since launched a competing AI company and chatbot, xAI and Grok.)
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The company has been public about plans to shore up its child safety measures. OpenAI recently announced new parental controls to be rolled out next month, which will allow users to control how ChatGPT talks to their child, and get notifications in instances of “acute distress.”
Still, OpenAI isn’t close to being the only AI firm on the receiving end of serious legal scrutiny over its child safety record. So far this year, Meta has also been hit with letters from attorneys general and senators over how its role-playing features interact with children.
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, PCMag’s parent company, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April 2025, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.
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This article was published by WTVG on 2025-09-07 13:31:00
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