Abstract photo of a wooden speech bubble with many small paper cut outs of speech bubbles in different colors and textures glued on top.

Governments Can Use AI to Repair Public Trust. If They Listen to People First

Illustrative photo captured during the plenary session of October 2025 in Strasbourg, France.

“Behind the scenes - European Parliament in Strasbourg” by 

EU’s Digital Sovereignty Push Runs Up Against Budget Cuts for Civil Society

An illustrative photo of a man walking through the corridors of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France.

Behind the scenes - European Parliament in Strasbourg

Despite Spyware Attacks on Its Own Officials, EU Response Falls Short

Open AI CEO Sam Altman does a television interview with CNBC's Kate Rooney before delivering the keynote address at the OpenAI developers conference at Fort Mason on September 29, 2026 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Heather Diehl/Getty Images)

OpenAI Faces Lawsuits, Subpoenas and EU Scrutiny in a Single Week

European Commission Executive Vice President Henna Virkkunen delivers a keynote address at the International AI Summit held at the RDS in Dublin, Ireland, on October 14, 2026.

Is Europe Ready for Advanced AI? The Growing Debate Over Liability

A finger is poised to tap the ChatGPT app icon displayed on a smartphone screen in Creteil, France, on October 1, 2026, as OpenAI begins rolling out Dots in ChatGPT, its new system of autonomous AI agents. (Photo by Samuel Boivin/NurPhoto via AP)

Another Week of Lawsuits Piling Up at OpenAI

A woman seen from behind looks at a huge selection of lettuce and greens in a supermarket refrigerator. 

The Age of Hypertrophy

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Supporters of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva at an election rally on Oct 11, 2026 in Sao Paulo, Brazil. (Rodilei Morais/Fotoarena/Sipa USA)

Meta Moderation Failures Loom Over Brazil’s Runoff Presidential Election

Colombian President Abelardo De La Espriella, left, and United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio embrace during a bilateral agreements signing ceremony in Barranquilla, Colombia, Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Fernando Vergara, Pool)

US Mining MoU with Colombia Must Safeguard Community Rights and Sustainability

A voter leaves a polling station as voting continues in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election on October 8, 2026 in London, England. (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)

UK Election Watchdog Develops AI System to Flag Deepfakes Within 3 Hours

Image Authentication Should be a Condition of AI Decisions

The International AI Summit exhibitors floor in Dublin, Ireland on October 14, 2026. Liz Carolan/Tech Policy Press

Riverdance Inside, Protestors Outside at Ireland’s Big AI Branding Bash

A blue flag with the logo of the ICC (a balancing weight) waves in the foreground with blue skies and whites clouds. In the background, the top of some office buildings. 

A view of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands, on August 22, 2026. (Photo by Karolina Janik/JPix/NurPhoto)

Two Targets, One Tactic as US Sanctions ICC and Silences #DisInfo2026

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The World’s Growing Patchwork of Age Bans and What It Reveals

Protesters demonstrate outside of the OpenAI DevDay 2026 conference, Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026, in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)

Multiple Polls Find Most Americans Think AI is Moving Too Fast

President Stubb and Prime Minister Støre in Rovaniemi on September 13, 2026. Photo: Katja Säilä / Finnish Government

AI Governance Needs an Internet-Style Network, Not a Global Overseer

Person hold the speaker to broadcast something

Why Multistakeholder Action Matters More than Ever for Trust & Safety

This image depicts clusters of various mushrooms growing on a network of surveillance cameras against a dark green textured background.

India’s GDPR-Inspired Privacy Law Leaves State Power Unchecked

A woman dressed in green holds a up a poster of a newspaper front page that says "Democracy is not a joke, Gyanesh". She is seen shouting, while at least three police officers appear to be pulling her away from behind as she steadies herself with one hand against the back of a truck.

A protester in Mumbai, India is detained by police during a protest demanding the resignation of the country's chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar on Oct. 10, 2026. (AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool)

India’s SIR Voter Purge Shows Digital Authoritarianism in Action

Mothballed Spirit Airlines passenger planes sit parked at Goodyear Airport, Thursday, May 28, 2026, in Goodyear, Ariz. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

Spirit Airlines Is Selling Its Workers’ Data. That Can’t Fly.

Mark Scott is a contributing editor at Tech Policy Press.

Illustrative photo captured during the plenary session in Strasbourg, France.

Brussels is gearing up to break a major cultural taboo: talking about money.

By the end of 2026, the European Union wants to finalize

 that will pay for everything from doling out agricultural subsidies and supporting Ukraine’s fight against Russia to boosting the bloc’s competitiveness and safeguarding its digital rulebook.

 on October 16 after national officials met in Brussels to hammer out a compromise before the real negotiations with the European Parliament and European Commission get underway.

“An agreement before the end of 2026 would allow for the adoption of legislative acts in 2027, which is necessary to ensure that EU funding reaches beneficiaries without interruption,” according to a 

 from the Council of the EU, the body which represents EU member states.

Policymakers are eager to secure the next so-called Multiannual Financial Framework — whose budget could 

 next month, however, has cast doubts on whether the EU can reach an agreement before far-right politician Marine Le Pen potentially becomes France’s new president next year.

For a town that prides itself on formality and ceremony, policymakers, lobbyists and civil society groups in Brussels are now ditching such niceties to guarantee their slice of the public funds expected to become available in early 2028.

Yet the collective capability in Europe — including internet governance groups, digital regulatory compliance non-profits and independent fact-checking organizations — required to uphold the bloc’s digital sovereignty ambitions is on track to lose out significantly.

 roughly €144 million, and almost 60 percent of that funding currently comes from either the United States government or US-based philanthropic organizations. EU institutional funding represents just 12 percent of the money required to implement the bloc’s digital rulebook, according to an 

 from the Atlantic Council’s Democracy + Tech Initiative.

On October 10, the six-month rotating Irish presidency of the European Council 

 the negotiating position for the 27 EU member states on the next EU budget. The document laid out proposed 30 percent funding cuts for 

, the sole European public funding program dedicated to supporting civil society, including those focused on the digital world.

The so-called AgoraEU program would receive €5.3 billion under the Council presidency’s proposal, down from the European Commission’s initial proposal of €7.6 billion. In its own draft, the European Parliament 

 increasing public funds to support civil society groups to €10.7 billion.

In contrast, Ireland’s negotiation position on behalf of EU member states offered just a 10 percent reduction in a separate program designed to fund next-generation technologies like AI infrastructure and quantum computing aimed at boosting Europe’s competitiveness with the likes of the US and China.

The EU’s agricultural subsidies — a political hot potato for many national capitals — were largely protected amid 

 from countries like Germany, France and the Netherlands to make significant cuts in the bloc’s seven-year budget in the name of efficiency.

“We are confident that the revised Negotiating Box provides a delicate balance between competing voices,” Helen McEntee, Ireland’s minister for foreign affairs, 

 in reference to the proposed EU budget document. “We must now move away from our opening positions and towards the final stages of negotiations.

The European Parliament was not impressed. In a 

 from leading politicians working on the civil society funding program, they criticized efforts by national capitals to hamstring public support for such groups in the name of cost savings.

“This cut will bring negligible savings to the EU budget,” said the members of the European Parliament, “but (it) will cause serious and irreversible damage to press freedom, the cultural and creative sectors, and civil society — precisely the areas that underpin the Union's democratic values.”

EU officials and politicians will now try to hammer out a compromise before the end of the year, though negotiations are likely to drag on well into 2027 as major disagreements remain.

Many national policymakers are reluctant to fund civil society amid concerns that groups use such public funds for advocacy around specific topics like campaigning against specific government policies. That is especially true in Germany — which provides the largest individual contribution to the EU budget — after Friedrich Merz’s government 

Yet amid such proposed reductions for civil society funding, digital groups are being asked to do more — even when the funding to support their work is on the chopping block.

In a series of roundtables that I organized in leading EU member states over the last 12 months when working for the Atlantic Council, officials 

 how non-government groups provided a significant share of evidence for digital regulation; promoted EU fundamental rights in the digital world; and represented a critical early-warning system for direct threats to both national and EU-wide democratic norms and institutions.

essential function in Brussels’ digital sovereignty ambitions

 as it seeks to reduce its dependencies, especially those associated with Washington.

The current EU budget negotiations, however, have yet to resolve a central tension between Europe’s digital ambitions and the funding needed to sustain them.

Policymakers have doubled down on funding digital infrastructure. But as negotiations get underway again around the next EU budget, Europe has yet to earmark similar public support for the democratic accountability layer — offered via these outside civil society groups — necessary to hold such technology to account.


On any given Tuesday night in America, a local government is hosting a meeting in a high school gymnasium to engage the public in something – from a new development, to traffic calming measures, to a master plan. There is lively discussion, notes scribbled, and dots placed on maps. There are online surveys and interactive tools.

Local governments reliably solicit people’s voices and collect data. For nearly two decades, I have worked with them to design creative tactics to bring people to the table. I have developed games, art, even theater to get people to show up and speak their minds. I am proud of this work. The problem is, in my experience, once governments assemble people and collect their data, they are not inclined to do anything with it. There is political power in holding a meeting, but very little in analyzing the data they collect. This is simply not sustainable. Governments are sitting on mountains of digital data. But because of a growing anti-AI sentiment, and the fear that listening to constituents will lead to unsustainable accountability, institutions are not eager to change their tactics.

This is exacerbating one of the most significant problems in democratic governance: people don’t trust government information or its messengers. A recent poll from 

 showed that only 27% of Americans trust the federal government; that’s down from 33% in 2025. The newest logic is that an AI chatbot could change that by creating a better user experience and providing better public information. But according to 

 63% of Americans believe AI is advancing too quickly, and 71% believe their personal information is less secure.

 website, then, with this context. The federal chatbot states that “despite 250 years of American progress, the citizen experience remains one of our nation’s greatest unrealized opportunities.” That’s true. The relationship between citizens and their public institutions is in crisis. Polarization and partisanship aside, public institutions need to take the production of trustworthy and reliable information seriously. But automation alone isn’t the answer. In fact, deploying more tools for one-way communication (chatbots included) without meaningful engagement in the limitations on use of data and opportunity for values alignment, more automation could be part of the problem.

It’s instructive to look at the local level. The most notorious case is the MyCity chatbot in New York City that was launched in 2023. It was designed to answer residents’ questions about starting a business, housing, and workers’ rights. But it gave answers to users that were wrong and in some cases illegal. It reportedly told landlords they could refuse tenants with housing vouchers, said employers could take a cut of workers' tips, and said businesses could refuse cash. All of these actions are against NYC or state law. As of last month, the chatbot has been taken down.

Well beyond New York City, city chatbots are used in hundreds of local agencies. For instance, the company 

 promises “faster, more accessible, and trusted service” to governments and their citizens through a chatbot interface. Governments like tools such as these because they provide quick solutions to real administrative problems. But do they repair trust? People access information through technical proxies, but access alone does not lead to trust. Trust in public information requires that people understand the intentions of the institution with which they’re interacting and that they believe they share some common values.

Before governments can be trusted to deliver information, they need to be trusted to collect, interpret, and act on it. This is why, in Evanston, Illinois, when the city was given access to disaggregated public health data in 2022 that revealed that the majority Black and historically redlined Fifth Ward neighborhood had a life expectancy 16 years below the city’s average, they partnered with the community instead of simply releasing the data. The City organized 

, where people in the neighborhood had the opportunity to scrutinize the data, add local nuance and discuss repercussions, prior to its public release. The result was a general willingness of residents to 

 to address the problem, as opposed to a suspicion of the data’s accuracy, and the intentions of the government.

In the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, because of a long history of neglect, trust in local government is low. Representations from mainstream news outlets tend to be negative, and the community’s access to government data is minimal and perceived by many locals to be unreliable. Instead of relying on mainstream chatbots to bypass these sources for local information, several community-based organizations have started building a trusted, local information source of their own. They curated trusted data sources from community organizations, open public data, and neighborhood leaders, and will soon be offering them up via a neighborhood chatbot interface called “On the Porch”. The community knows all too well that there is no shortcut to trusted information; it has to be cultivated.

At this moment of intersecting trust crises, in government and in AI, governments need to redirect their efforts from simply disseminating data to acting with accountability on the mountains of input, feedback and data they already have. People don't trust information; they trust messengers. And messengers become trustworthy when they authentically listen before they speak.

Government agencies, local and federal alike, should keep investing in better data quality, access, and legibility. Chatbots can help with that work. But they are not a replacement for listening to people. In my book, 

, I offer a framework for listening with accountability in ways that don’t further extractive surveillance, but demonstrate listening as a reciprocal process, beyond the intake of information. It is a relationship in which the speaker trusts the listener's intention to receive, comprehend, and remember what is being said. That relationship doesn't have to be small or intimate. It can happen at scale, through the kind of social scaffolding we saw in Evanston and Boston.

To confront our very real trust deficit, it would be misguided for governments not to deploy new technologies. But to deploy those technologies without prioritizing the human relationships that lead to institutional trust would be even worse.

Vas Panagiotopoulos is a fellow at Tech Policy Press.

“It is completely unacceptable if this [hacking] were to be the case.” Those were European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s only 

 on the abuse of spyware in the European Union, made in July 2021 following the 

Five years on, Stelios Kouloglou has become the latest Member of the European Parliament known to have been targeted with commercial spyware. The now-retired lawmaker was 

, ironically, while serving on the European Parliament’s Committee of Inquiry to Investigate the Use of Pegasus and Equivalent Surveillance Spyware (PEGA). A forensic analysis of his device by Citizen Lab in July 

 that the attackers could potentially have gained access to confidential documents and committee deliberations.

Despite evidence of widespread targeting within EU institutions, the bloc has yet to take its own security problem seriously, let alone introduce EU-wide legislation specifically addressing spyware misuse.

Spyware victims within EU Institutions may far exceed 60

Kouloglou is the latest addition to a growing list of at least 18 EU officials and 10 MEPs targeted with the technology. Even that figure may be a significant underestimate.

 by the European Parliament’s PEGA committee cited “some sixty detected infections” within the European Commission, while a 

 to PEGA rapporteur Sophie in ’t Veld acknowledged that Commission staff had received Apple notifications in November 2021 and that “several device checks led to the discovery of indicators of compromise.”

Confirmed targets from that list include some of the EU’s most senior political figures. 

, President of the European Parliament, was targeted with Predator, while former European Commissioner 

 other European Commission staff members were also targeted with Pegasus, including 

 of then-Commission Vice-President Věra Jourová’s cabinet. Among MEPs, those targeted or infected include 

, who were targeted through their family members or staff. A Parliament staff member serving on the Security and Defense Subcommittee 

This significant breach of the European Union’s own security poses severe risks for compromise of sensitive EU information, counterintelligence, proliferation of offensive capabilities, and strategic and democratic destabilization.

“This is particularly concerning given the number and seniority of EU officials who have reportedly been targeted,” said Aljosa Ajanovic, a policy advisor at European Digital Rights (EDRi), an association of civil and human rights groups.

“The European institutions should be treating this as a serious institutional security problem, not simply as a collection of isolated incidents,” he told Tech Policy Press.

It’s worth pointing out that Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) 

 from 2024 that Russian state hackers are deploying exploits “identical or strikingly similar” to those developed by spyware firms Intellexa and NSO Group.

“In the current geopolitical scenario, in which the EU is facing pressures from both its West and its East, a compromised device can definitely pose a major threat to its own security, with unknown consequences,” added Ajanovic.

In an email to Tech Policy Press, a Commission spokesperson neither commented on the “sixty detected infections” nor on potential policy or legislative measures related to spyware. They limited themselves to saying that the Commission “proactively implement[s] measures to protect [its] staff from cybersecurity threats, investing heavily in state-of-the-art tools for monitoring, detection and incident response. Such measures include the ongoing development of means to detect mobile device compromise at scale, in collaboration with other entities in the EU.”

 to investigate the abuse of spyware in Europe, following scandals in Spain, Greece, Hungary and Poland. The committee, among other recommendations, 

 for adopting EU-wide legislation to prevent the misuse of spyware, strengthening independent oversight, ensuring victims have access to effective legal remedies, and enforcing export controls

The inquiry was meant to address a broader gap in Europe’s response to spyware abuse. Yet, the European Commission has yet to propose such legislation, despite the European Parliament adopting a 

 criticizing the lack of a legislative follow-up and holding several debates on the status of the PEGA recommendations.

 that the existing legal framework — referring to the GDPR, ePrivacy Directive, Cyber Resilience Act, European Media Freedom Act and Law Enforcement Directive — is sufficient to tackle spyware abuse, instead of introducing new legislation that would address the specificities of commercial spyware directly and set EU-wide standards.

“There is clearly a political decision somewhere in the higher echelons of the Commission not to make spyware a major EU policy priority,” said EDRi’s Ajanovic, adding that “the disappearance of a 

, the lack of implementation of any PEGA recommendations and the shift towards saying that existing legislation is already sufficient all point in that same direction.”

Spyware makers’ access to sensitive data is facing increased scrutiny

The Commission’s and national governments’ persistent failure to act has left victims like Kouloglou with few options other than litigation to investigate, seek remedies and accountability.

In late September, Kouloglou filed charges against NSO Group over his Pegasus surveillance and Athens prosecutors 

“The particular significance of the case is that the complaint does not stop at establishing that Stelios Kouloglou was targeted with Pegasus. It names specific executives of NSO Group and calls for their possible involvement and responsibility to be investigated,” said Zacharias Kesses, a lawyer representing Kouloglou as well as several other spyware victims in Greece.

“Companies that develop or supply such tools cannot distance themselves from their use when there are serious indications of abuse,” he told Tech Policy Press.

Indeed, spyware manufacturers’ access to sensitive data with implications for national security — or, in this case, EU security — is facing increased scrutiny.

In November 2024, court documents released in the US litigation between NSO Group and WhatsApp 

 that NSO, rather than its customers, “installs and extracts” information from mobile devices targeted by Pegasus.

 on October 12 that Poland’s Central Anti-Corruption Bureau, which used Pegasus, lacked full control over the system operated by NSO Group. The server module responsible for infecting mobile devices remained exclusively under the manufacturer’s control.

Prosecutors also said that data collected by the spyware was routed outside Poland through an anonymizing network using servers abroad. The Polish investigation found that the data was transmitted via foreign IP addresses.

Intellexa’s access to customer data is being scrutinized too. In September, a high-ranking Greek spy agency officer 

 criminal charges against four executives linked to the firm, stating that “due to his job and official duties he manages sensitive, highly classified information, whose leakage to third parties, and even private individuals, threatens national security and constitutes espionage.”

Litigation offers a path to investigation and accountability

Victims of commercial spyware face multiple barriers to obtaining remedies, including difficulties proving that they were targeted and obtaining forensic evidence, lack of notification, limited access to information held by authorities, inadequate or politically compromised investigations, jurisdictional obstacles, and difficulties securing effective redress.

Litigation – both through national courts and through the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) – is now the most important and viable route for accountability and justice for the many spyware victims – EU officials or not.

“Strategic litigation is essential for holding those responsible to account and obtaining justice for human rights violations when institutional mechanisms fail, or there is no political will to address them,” said Cèlia Carbonell, from Catalan human rights NGO Irídia, who is part of a 

 against spyware currently involved in nine cases across three countries.

“The coalition is a space to share knowledge, strategies and ideas that can support ongoing and new litigation against spyware, with the aim of setting positive legal precedents that benefit everyone and bring about change,” she explained.

Zacharias Kesses agrees that legal action is absolutely necessary at this stage for Kouloglou’s case. “What is now expected is a substantive investigation into those responsible and the extent of the breach. At the same time, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg may examine the state’s responsibility, provided the admissibility requirements are met,” he said.

“Judicial proceedings do not absolve the European Union and governments of their obligation to act,” he added.

 may have only whetted the appetite of state attorneys general to take on Big Tech. This past Wednesday, eight state attorneys general — from 

 — announced new lawsuits against OpenAI, accusing the frontier lab of a variety of illegal activities, many of which echo the recently resolved claims against Meta. Although Wednesday’s actions by the state attorneys general were coordinated and share the same counsel — large identical passages appear in the lawsuits — the suits were filed separately.

The state suits may have attracted the most headlines, but they were not the only new legal claims against the company last week. On Tuesday, a proposed 

 in the United States District Court in the Northern District of California on behalf of a mother and her two children concerning OpenAI’s acquisition of children's data. And on Wednesday, litigation and advocacy organization Tech Justice Law and co-counsel filed another four suits in San Francisco County, California on behalf of private individuals alleged to have been harmed by OpenAI’s products. That group has 

 complaints with co-counsel against OpenAI in California State courts. Many of these have been consolidated as Judicial Council Coordination Proceeding No. 5431, and the advocacy organization expects the new cases to also join this proceeding.

In June, Florida also sued OpenAI grounded in similar concerns. Many of the same claims are therefore set to be considered in parallel in nine different state courts. This article will lay out the cases made in these new lawsuits.

The primary charge in the lawsuits is that OpenAI made unfounded claims of safety when its products were, in fact, harmful. In particular, though to varying degrees, the suits emphasize claims made to parents and risks and incidents of harm that children are exposed to. (Also present is a parallel argument that the company falsely claims the product to be generally “trustworthy and reliable.”)

The examples of harm given focus on the physical and on those that can lead to physical harm: promoting, assisting with, or failing to discourage violence and suicide, giving dangerous medical advice, encouraging paranoias and delusions. Financial harms come up as well, including poor tax advice, and harms to critical thinking. Data collection, particularly from minors, is a recurring concern, and is reason for claims under state privacy law, such as in the Montana suit. Finally, the lawsuits also raise concerns about ‘rogue’ agents committing computer crimes or otherwise acting deceptively or maliciously against the intention of the user. Here, they cite OpenAI’s own recent admissions related to the Hugging Face incident; Iowa brings a separate count over OpenAI’s testing of autonomous agents.

OpenAI is accused of putting up a façade of safety through a host of measures, including its largely abandoned non-profit status; an unfulfilled pledge to direct a larger proportion of its compute resources towards safety research; and even the 12+ and 13+ age classification it claimed for its app. Complaints also point out that some guardrails are easy to circumvent. Multiple whistleblowers and other internal watchdogs have indicated that OpenAI should be aware of the dangers in their products but is failing to effectively mitigate them, and instead has been hurtling from one model release to the next with insufficient safety testing.

In a claim highly reminiscent of those against social media companies, the States also hold up the sycophancy of some of OpenAI’s models, along with their mimicry of human emotion, as evidence of the company working to manipulate users, juice engagement, and build dependency.

The secondary claim, again reminding us of the playbook against Meta, is that OpenAI has been collecting and using children’s data without proper consent and without taking appropriate steps to assess if users are indeed children.

As they have been filed with reference to state and not federal law, the lawsuits’ details here do vary a little. The allegations of falsely claiming safety (and reliability) or other kinds of deception are brought with respect to consumer protection and deceptive trade practices laws. The use of children’s data may fall under general data privacy laws or child-specific ones. Nebraska also has an Age-Appropriate Online Design Code law that includes privacy, advertising, deceptive design, and addictive design measures.

Aside from these jurisdiction-specific laws, claims are brought under common law, including (at least in some states) negligence, liability for defective design and for failure to warn, unjust enrichment, and public nuisance.

The requests for relief also vary significantly between the states, in part due to the different legal environments. Monetary relief is sought in several different ways: damages, penalties when included in the relevant laws, disgorgement for gains that OpenAI made through illegal business practices, and reimbursement for those who paid for a product that was being misrepresented.

The states are also seeking a range of injunctive relief orders, including, as well as the end to some of the practices described above, deletion of user data, and the imposition of age assurance and other safety measures. Some states go even further, asking courts to order a pause in model testing and development until safeguards are in place (in some cases specifying models capable of recursive self-improvement — Arkansas seeks to “Enjoin Defendants from creating models capable of recursive self-improvement until they can ensure that such models will be aligned with human values”), or imposing monitoring and incident reporting requirements.

 following the announcement of the lawsuits, saying it has “built industry-leading age-specific protections into our product that many other AI products lack.” Company spokesperson Drew Pusateri said, “We’re committed to working with states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry, not just one company.”

 with the law firm Normand, Judkins & Couch in a California Superior Court on behalf of James Gates, a North Carolina man who alleges his estranged wife, Cheryl, used ChatGPT to concoct a plan to poison him. According to the complaint, ChatGPT “validated, amplified, and escalated” Cheryl’s concerns about her marriage to James. The chatbot then coached her on how to purchase, prepare, and deliver substances to poison him, and how to destroy digital evidence. James fell ill in July 2025, and Cheryl was indicted for attempted first-degree murder. (Notably, the chatbot assured Cheryl that deleted ChatGPT conversations are “unrecoverable,” even with a subpoena, which the suit notes is a “patently false representation of ChatGPT’s own data-retention practices.”)

 with various co-counsels brought on behalf of the parents of 

, a teenager from Lebanon who died by suicide, and two adults, 

, who allegedly experienced extended delusional episodes while using ChatGPT. In each case, the harmful psychological states that overcame the individuals were allegedly brought on by ChatGPT usage. In particular the “addictive, anthropomorphic, and sycophantic” (Habib Complaint) features of the product are blamed for drawing them in and encouraging dangerous lines of thinking. As with the state AG lawsuits, evidence is cited that OpenAI knew about these risks, did not disclose the dangers, and failed to properly mitigate them.

In the Habib case, it is alleged that OpenAI (or the product itself) knew about Mathias Habib’s status as a minor but did not take appropriate steps to avoid his exposure to positive depictions of suicide and darker views of life during initially anodyne philosophical explorations with ChatGPT.

Hill’s spiritual beliefs and delusional thinking were allegedly embraced and exacerbated by the chatbot, including encouraging her to isolate herself and stop eating, and discouraging her from giving her dog insulin or veterinary care, leading to damage to her relationships, health, and finances, and the dog’s death.

Works shared his theories with ChatGPT, which according to the complaint, responded with escalating levels of enthusiasm that led to delusions of grandeur and manic episodes; gave faulty medical diagnoses; encouraged unhealthy romantic fixations; and sent him on nonsensical “missions,” one of which led to his arrest.

Many of the legal claims are similar to the state suits discussed above. These include strict product liability, deceptive business practices, negligent design, and failure to warn. Three of the suits contain more novel claims, such as that ChatGPT engaged in the unlicensed practice of medicine and violated a new California law that bars AI systems from implying they are a licensed professional. In the Habib complaint, state laws on manslaughter, wrongful death, and encouraging suicide are also implicated.

In the Hill and Works complaints, California's constitutional right to privacy is invoked, which is understood to include “autonomy privacy,” an aspect of which is the right to not have your thoughts, emotions and decision-making interfered with. These suits also include common law liability for “negligent entrustment,” on the theory that OpenAI should have known that psychologically vulnerable individuals were at risk of endangering themselves and others through their use of the product.

Again, damages and costs dominate the requests for relief. The injunctive relief in these suits focuses on requiring OpenAI to implement warnings about and interventions to protect against the particular harms that were at issue in each case. The broadest of these are in the Habib lawsuit, which seeks a prohibition against “companion-like conversations” with minors; limits and additional guardrails for teen access; mandatory reporting to emergency contacts in the case of detecting suicide risk; and hard refusals for prompts about suicide and self-harm.

OpenAI has yet to publicly address these suits.

A lawsuit brought by another set of firms and the EdTech Law Center for a Jane Doe on behalf of her 12-year-old daughter and 16-year-old son seeks to hold OpenAI accountable for “unlawful business practices that prey on children.” It alleges that OpenAI design features extract vast amounts of information from children, including “their most sensitive health information; highly personal details of their social and family relationships; photos of their faces and bodies; recordings of their voices; their hobbies, interests, dreams, and hopes in their young lives; and their emotions, insecurities, disappointments, fears, and struggles.” The suit uses chatlogs to substantiate its claims, and argues that specific design features are the means through which ChatGPT extracts information from children.

The suit relies on California contract and property law in its claims against OpenAI’s terms of use. It focuses on “Section 1568.5 of California’s Civil Code, a one-sentence statute” that says a minor’s claim that a parent has granted consent does not count as consent. It seeks a declaration that OpenAI’s terms are voided under an 1874 California rule that limits the types of contracts a minor can enter into. And it brings an unjust enrichment claim under the state’s “accession” statues.

The suit asks for restitution, disgorgement of profits, and the imposition of “a constructive trust over all of the benefits and income that OpenAI derives from Plaintiffs’ information that OpenAI wrongfully extracted.” It calls on the court to provide victims an equity stake or the cash equivalent “in proportion to the number of tokens each child contributed to OpenAI through ChatGPT.” It harkens back to ancient Rome for its theory of a just result:

The law does not allow OpenAI to keep the vast profits it reaps from its scheme. The law recognizes that when someone takes something that does not belong to them and turns it into something even more valuable, the wrongdoer must turn over the new, more valuable thing to their victim. Going back to Roman times, if a wrongdoer stole someone’s grapes and turned them into wine, the victim was compensated on the value of the wine, not the grapes. Here, OpenAI took invaluable information from children—their grapes—and turned it into a trillion-dollar company—the wine. OpenAI irretrievably embedded the children’s grapes into its AI models, bottled, corked, and sold the wine, and pocketed immense profits. Under California law, OpenAI must turn over a corresponding share of its trillion-dollar wine to the children whose grapes it stole to make it.

, OpenAI said “We strongly disagree with this misguided lawsuit that singles out OpenAI despite the industry-leading age-specific protections we’ve built into our product.”

 constitute the “Big Tobacco moment” for social media that activists have been hoping for. However that pans out, it is now clear that government and private attorneys are not willing to wait to pursue a similar turning point for AI.

Tech Policy Press - Technology and Democracy

Tech Policy Press is tracking laws and regulations, along with government investigations and litigation, that will shape the rules and accountability for tech companies.

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