The lawsuits that could give AI its ‘Big Tobacco’ moment - POLITICO
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The lawsuits that could give AI its ‘Big Tobacco’ moment<br>Litigation attacking chatbots as dangerous products are opening a new frontier in legal fights against tech.
A laptop screen pictured next to the logo of the Chat AI application on a smartphone screen. | Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images
By Aaron Mak06/06/2026 12:00 PM EDT
The legal strategy that hammered the tobacco industry and inspired a cascade of social media lawsuits is posing a rising threat to artificial intelligence companies.<br>That threat got its boldest example Monday when Florida Republican Attorney General James Uthmeier sued OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, alleging in part that ChatGPT is a dangerous product for users’ mental health and public safety.
The suit is a novel use of product liability law for AI — and it parallels a legal strategy that plaintiffs are wielding in thousands of cases against major social platforms this year. The approach also echoes the litigation that almost every U.S. state waged against the giant tobacco companies in the 1990s, leading to multibillion-dollar settlements and restrictions on cigarette marketing.
It also comes as Congress lags in passing federal AI safety regulation, a policy vacuum that could fuel more suits like Uthmeier’s. “This litigation is a reflection of the frustrations of that there’s not a uniform, cohesive standard at the federal level,” said Michelle Lopes Maldonado, associate director of AI policy at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation — a think tank whose funders include AI developers like Anthropic and Alphabet.<br>A New Mexico jury held Meta liable in March for failing to implement sufficient safeguards against sexual predators, and a jury in California found that Meta and YouTube had intentionally designed their platforms to be addictive.<br>Now, Uthmeier’s lawsuit has AI companies worried that social media’s “Big Tobacco” moment is coming for them as well.<br>“There is concern [among AI companies] about what happens with this product liability approach,” said Maldonado. “The possibility of multiplying suits by state attorneys generals could be real.”<br>Uthmeier asserts that OpenAI should be liable for incidents in which ChatGPT is accused of leading users to commit acts of violence and suffer from mental health issues. OpenAI did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the suit, but it has previously denied wrongdoing and said it continues to strengthen safeguards for ChatGPT.<br>Users and their families have already brought a handful of cases against AI chatbot companies for purported mental health harms, but Uthmeier is the first attorney general to do so. His involvement is a major step for the kids online safety movement, said Matthew Bergman, an attorney representing the alleged victims in the California social media addiction case and separate chatbot litigation as the founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center.<br>“The Florida AG has statutory authority that we do not to act in the interests of the population in general as opposed to particular individuals or families who have been grievously harmed by ChatGPT,” Bergman said. “What we have learned in the social media litigation is that the efforts of state AGs are complementary to the efforts of individuals in trying to hold these platforms accountable.”<br>Yet some key differences between AI chatbots and traditional social media platforms could be relevant to courts, particularly when it comes to speech laws.<br>One of those differences concerns Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the 1996 regulation that shields online platforms from liability for user-posted content.<br>The tech industry has long relied on Section 230 to ward off a wide variety of lawsuits, to the anger of critics such as President Donald Trump. But some lower courts have found that the section doesn’t apply to the current wave of cases because the allegations concern how the platforms are designed, rather than what users are posting.<br>And AI companies may have a weaker Section 230 claim, Maldonado said, because the chatbot — not the user — is producing the speech under dispute.<br>University of Florida media law professor Jane Bambauer added that Section 230 is premised on the idea that someone harmed by online content should sue the user who posted it, not the platform. “For an AI chatbot, there’s just no other party to sue,” she told POLITICO. “There’s no other person who made the defamatory or dangerous statement.”<br>If a court decides that Section 230 isn’t relevant to an online case, it will then evaluate whether the First Amendment applies. Courts have yet to come to a consensus on this question in the social media litigation.<br>Some social media companies have invoked the 2024 Supreme Court case Moody v. NetChoice, which established that platforms have an expressive right to design algorithms for placing a priority on certain content — in...