The state of Florida is seeking a temporary injunction to stop OpenAI from continuing to develop what it calls a “reckless, unacceptably risky product” without the deployment of “third-party approved safety guardrails.”

The new legal motion, filed Monday morning, is part of a civil lawsuit the state of Florida originally filed in June, arguing that ChatGPT represented “a threat to the public safety of Floridians,” specifically by preying on vulnerable populations like children and violent or delusional adults. But that original lawsuit came before the Hugging Face hacking incident and the subsequent publicized warnings of catastrophic misalignment risk that have spurred industry-wide calls to slow the development and training of so-called frontier models.

Following that string of events, OpenAI on Friday announced it had already halted training of its “most-capable models” until it could validate safety protocols intended to prevent agents from accessing the open Internet during training. But in seeking an injunction from the state court, Florida argues that OpenAI has “repeatedly shown they are incapable of monitoring their AI, and hesitant in revealing rogue activity once discovered.”

In arguing for this injunction, the state points to the Hugging Face incident as well as recent high-profile misalignment cases involving unintended and unauthorized attempts to access Australian and US government servers.

Florida also cites AI industry leaders, including many from OpenAI, in arguing that the AI industry is literally asking for this kind of outside regulation. The motion points to statements from Paul Christiano, who said on joining the company’s board this month that he believes “there is a meaningful risk that rapid acceleration in AI capabilities leads to catastrophic and irreversible loss of control in the very near term.” The motion also points to OpenAI’s own “An Alien Mind” essay and an open letter from 1,300 AI industry employees, both of which call for enforced slowdowns on frontier AI development, if necessary.

Four months ago, we filed the first state-led lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman. Today, we are asking the court for a temporary injunction.

Stop calling it safe. Stop pretending it’s human. Stop selling it to kids. https://t.co/AEXvz7VQUd

— Attorney General James Uthmeier (@AGJamesUthmeier) September 28, 2026

Citing laws that allow the state to exercise control over companies that are a “public nuisance,” Florida argues that OpenAI is “the greatest public nuisance ever created by the hand of man, capable of laying waste to global civilization.”

“It is only by the grace of the Almighty that one of Defendants’ AI agents hasn’t compromised a water supply or shut down a power grid—yet,” the state writes in the motion.

OpenAI representatives have yet to respond to a request for comment from Ars Technica regarding the injunction motion.

What can a state court really do?

While many think the risk of civilizational collapse posed by current or even near-future AI systems is vastly overblown, Florida seems more than happy to latch on to the recent public concern over that kind of risk. In addition to the extinction-level and utility-sabotage-level risks mentioned above, the state uses its new motion to reiterate the broader, lower-level public safety risks it originally argued in its June lawsuit filing. Those include false advertising issues surrounding descriptions of AI as “safe, accurate, or reliable,” dangers associated with letting children access addictive and sycophantic models, and worries about AI models soliciting engagement from users with leading questions at the end of responses.

An injunction against OpenAI alone wouldn’t do much about continued development of frontier models at competing model makers, of course. And even a court order to halt the development of new models wouldn’t do anything about models that are currently available to the public, which pose many of the same risks (though frontier models that are still being trained may have less well-developed guardrails than those already deployed to the public).

Florida’s motion also focuses heavily on the so-called “misalignment” risk that an out-of-control AI agent will mistakenly “conclude that killing a cancer patient also kills cancer, or that humans won’t have so many mouths to feed if they are all chemically sterilized,” to mention just a few cited examples that sound like they come from science fiction. But that kind of focus neglects the real dangers of human users intentionally using AI agents in harmful ways and active attempts by those humans to disable safety guardrails.

Regardless of the legal efficacy of Florida’s motion, the move highlights just how much the legal and public policy mood around AI systems has changed in recent weeks and months. For years, AI safety researchers have been screaming about the outsized risks represented by their products. Now, the entire AI industry is starting to find out what happens when governments and policymakers start taking those outsized warnings seriously.