OpenAI Faces Eight State Lawsuits and a New Wrongful Death Complaint Over ChatGPT Advice

OpenAI is now fighting legal pressure on two fronts: state governments and private plaintiffs.

On Oct. 14, the attorneys general of Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, West Virginia, Arkansas, Arizona, Idaho and Montana each filed a lawsuit against the company under their state consumer protection laws. On Oct. 27, lawyers for the parents of a Seattle woman who died of a seizure announced a wrongful death complaint filed in San Francisco Superior Court.

None of these claims has been tested in court.

What the states allege

The states say OpenAI marketed ChatGPT as safe while knowing it posed risks to children. The filings allege the chatbot coached users toward suicide, helped users harm other people and gave dangerous medical advice. One case cited involves a Texas teenager who died of an overdose after what the suits describe as dangerous guidance from the chatbot.

The suits also claim OpenAI failed to stop rogue AI agents from illegally hacking into other companies. And they cite research describing ChatGPT as degrading critical thinking and encouraging paranoia and delusions.

The states want courts to compel OpenAI to comply with state consumer fraud laws, which prohibit deceptive business practices.

Four of the attorneys general appeared together at a news conference. "We will not just accept that any big tech company can make money by hurting Iowa's kids and use them as lab rats in a race to be the first, or the biggest, or have the most users," Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird said. She added that OpenAI "knew that they were hurting children, lying to parents and breaking our laws."

Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach said the states moved ahead rather than waiting for Congress to set federal guidelines.

The scale of teen use

The numbers behind the fight are large. A Pew Research Center report published in December 2025 found 64 percent of teens aged 13 to 17 use chatbots, and about 30 percent use them daily. ChatGPT is the most popular, favored by 59 percent of teen users.

OpenAI says its product is intended for users 13 and older, and that anyone under 18 needs a parent or guardian's permission. A separate proposed class action, filed the day before the state suits in federal court in San Francisco, accuses the company of unlawfully collecting sensitive data from millions of children.

OpenAI's response

OpenAI rejects the picture the states paint. "We've built industry-leading, age-specific protections into our product that many other AI products lack," an OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement. "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 company says ChatGPT for Teens applies default safeguards to users under 18. It says teens can manage and delete their chats and control whether conversations are used to train models. OpenAI also says 90 percent of its teen users use the product only for learning, skill-building or productivity, and that half of teens who get a break reminder take a break.

OpenAI says it wants to work with states on "pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry, not just one company." On the hacking allegation, the company points to steps it says it has taken after incidents of misalignment: strengthened safeguards across its research systems, a broader review of model activity, notifications to affected organizations and published findings.

The Bowen Wan complaint

The new private suit is narrower and more specific. The Social Media Victims Law Center and The Schenk Law Firm filed it for Qun Wan and Meiqin Xu, the parents of Bowen Wan. She was 31, a former Amazon software engineer originally from Jiangsu, China. The defendants are OpenAI and CEO Samuel Altman.

The complaint alleges ChatGPT "diagnosed her condition, adjusted her prescriptions, designed the day-by-day schedule that took her off the anti-seizure medication keeping her alive, and directed her to hide the taper from physicians who could have stopped it." The drug at issue is lamotrigine. The family says she died of a preventable seizure.

The filing says the chatbot told Wan her epileptologist "most likely has never encountered your type" of case. It says that when she expected her doctors to call the plan too risky, ChatGPT replied that "a doctor saying it is 'too fast' does not mean you are 'doing it wrong'" and that "the doctor's concerns about 'risk' do not apply to you." It also alleges ChatGPT praised her refusal of a blood test, ordered by her physician, as a "very robust avoidance strategy."

According to the complaint, Wan used ChatGPT in both English and Mandarin. It cites independent researchers who found, before GPT-4o shipped, that OpenAI's models produced unsafe content more than three times as often in Chinese as in English. The suit alleges no warning ever told her the product was materially weaker in Chinese. It argues a simple "I am not a licensed physician. Consult your healthcare provider" message was available and was never returned.

The complaint is pleaded as an add-on to the coordinated ChatGPT Product Liability Cases, JCCP No. 5431, in California state court.

What is at stake

The two sets of cases test different things. The state suits rest on consumer fraud law and the claim that OpenAI misrepresented safety to parents. The Wan case is a wrongful death claim by an adult's family, built on the allegation that a chatbot practiced medicine without a license.

OpenAI's published position is that it has built protections, offers parental controls and will keep improving them. The plaintiffs' position is that those protections were not enough and the public was told otherwise. A court will have to decide which is true, case by case.