New York Attorney General Letitia James has served OpenAI with a subpoena, acting on behalf of a coalition of 42 state attorneys general.
The subpoena seeks documents covering OpenAI’s advertising practices, user engagement and retention strategies, handling of consumer and health data, its treatment of minors and seniors, use of deep learning models, model sycophancy, and internal company policies. AI Sycophancy, in this context, describes a chatbot that tells a user what they want to hear rather than what is true or safe.
It is the broadest legal investigation any state government has opened against an AI company, and it lands just days after OpenAI quietly filed paperwork for an initial public offering (IPO) that financial analysts expect could rank among the largest technology listings on record.
A Warning That Came Months Earlier
This subpoena did not appear out of nowhere. In 2025, a coalition of 44 state attorneys general had already written to major tech and AI companies asking for stronger child safety protections in chatbot interactions. By December, the same 42-state coalition sent a joint letter to OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, Google, and xAI, urging the companies to put safeguards in place for vulnerable chatbot users.
Six months later, OpenAI became the first of those five companies to face a formal subpoena tied to the issue.
Florida Moved First, With a Lawsuit
Florida sued OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman directly on June 1, with Attorney General James Uthmeier accusing the company of releasing and marketing ChatGPT to the public, including children, while concealing known risks and suppressing internal safety warnings. This lawsuit came out of a criminal investigation Florida opened in April, examining whether ChatGPT played a role in a mass shooting at Florida State University the previous year. Prosecutors reviewed chat logs showing the suspect had allegedly used the chatbot to seek advice on weapons, ammunition, timing, and campus locations.
Other lawsuits have also followed similar lines. The parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine allege ChatGPT validated their son’s suicidal thoughts and offered methods of self-harm rather than directing him toward help, and a Canadian mother has filed a separate suit alleging the chatbot encouraged her daughter’s suicide.
Timing That Complicates the IPO
OpenAI filed confidentially for its IPO on June 8, five days before the subpoena became public. Under securities law, a legal matter of this size has to be disclosed to investors in the company’s eventual S-1 prospectus, which means the investigation now becomes part of the record any underwriter or buyer has to weigh.
OpenAI has said it takes the concerns raised by the state attorneys general seriously and intends to engage constructively with their offices. For now, the subpoena is a request for records rather than a finding of wrongdoing. The document production process alone is expected to stretch on for months. But with dozens of individual lawsuits already filed and more than four in five U.S. states now asking questions at once, OpenAI’s growth story may take a pause.
