Florida asks a judge to stop OpenAI building new models without outside approval

Florida has tried two routes to rules for AI companies, and they have ended in different places. The statute route was DeSantis's "AI bill of rights", and according to Vox it was defeated by Republicans in his own state with close White House ties ^[13]. The court route depends on one officeholder. Uthmeier is the governor's handpicked attorney general, and he is now running to win the office in his own right ^[15]. He filed in June ^[3] and has since gone back to the judge with a further request ^[8].

That request matters most to operators. Uthmeier wants the court to block OpenAI from developing new models unless they have "independent third-party guardrails and approval," Vox reported ^[8]. Trump declined to impose something similar at the federal level. According to Yahoo News, he backed out of signing an executive order that would have required a government safety review of upcoming models before release ^[5]. The two instruments differ: one was a federal review, the other is outside approval enforced by a court. Both would act before a new model reaches the public ^[8][5]. "Floridians will not be the test subjects," Forrest Saunders, a spokesperson for Uthmeier, told Vox ^[6].

The complaint names the developer and its chief executive ^[1]. The sources do not show Florida acting against companies that deploy OpenAI's models. The allegations, though, concern design choices that deployers also make. Uthmeier said OpenAI and Altman "ignored internal and external safety warnings, put children at great risk, and allowed a dangerous product to reach millions of Floridians" ^[7]. A spokesperson for OpenAI said the company has "leading protections and policies" for minors, including age prediction and monitoring tools for parents ^[12]. Yahoo News reported that those tools work only if a child accepts a parent's request to connect accounts, and that minors can unlink at any time ^[12]. In my view, any company running a consumer chatbot with teenage users will face the same question about its own consent flows.

A skeptic would call this positioning by an attorney general seeking election ^[15] and a term-limited governor ^[14]. "He's trying to skate where the puck is going," Jeff Brandes, a former Republican state senator, told Vox ^[16]. Vox reported that most of the Florida observers it spoke to believe the pair are trying to set the party's AI position for after Trump ^[18]. Motive aside, the legal record against OpenAI is growing. Florida opened a criminal investigation in April ^[10], and Yahoo News lists 14 private complaints against the company filed in November and April ^[20].

The case runs on two timelines. This quarter, the open item is the judge's answer on the model request, and we do not know yet how the court will rule. Over the decade, the question is whether Republicans follow DeSantis and Uthmeier once Trump is gone, a bet Vox says rests on public backlash against AI growing deeper ^[19]. For a company building on OpenAI, the decision now is how much of its product plan assumes new models arrive on the developer's own schedule. If the judge grants Uthmeier's request, an outside approver would sit between OpenAI and its next model ^[8].