Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier has asked a state judge to temporarily bar OpenAI from developing new artificial intelligence models without independent oversight.

The motion, filed with Judge Heather Beato of the 10th Judicial Circuit of Florida, asks the court for a temporary injunction in the state's pending lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman. Uthmeier's filing, reported Tuesday by Law.com, calls the injunction vital to protect Florida residents from what the state describes as potentially dangerous and unregulated technology.

The Florida attorney general grounded the motion in recent security incidents involving OpenAI, including reported hacks of AI platform Hugging Face and the Australian government. The filing also cites a social media post from an Anthropic executive stating that he "earnestly believe[s] AI could kill all humans!"

In the motion's most pointed language, Uthmeier characterizes OpenAI's public statements about AI risk as an invitation for government intervention.

"Defendants claim they cannot stop barreling forward with their potentially civilization-ending endeavors unless they are forced to do so by the government," Uthmeier said, according to Law.com. "They have asked the government to tie them to the mast. Plaintiff brings good news to the defendants: The Florida attorney general is answering your cry for help with a motion to enjoin you from harming Floridians with your reckless, unacceptably risky product."

Florida filed the underlying suit against OpenAI and Altman in June. The complaint alleges that the company's ChatGPT platform misrepresented its safety and harmed minors who use the product.

Lawyers for OpenAI at Gunster and Paul Hastings did not respond to requests for comment, according to Law.com. An OpenAI spokesperson told Axios and several other news outlets that the company is "committed to working with Florida and other states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry—not just one company."

For practitioners, the motion raises a question with few precedents: whether a state court will condition continued development of AI models on independent oversight while litigation is pending. If Judge Beato grants the temporary injunction, OpenAI would face a court-ordered regulatory structure in Florida before any trial on the merits of the state's consumer protection and minors' safety claims. Companies developing frontier models would also need to weigh whether similar injunction requests could spread to other states with pending or contemplated AI litigation.

The reference to the "tie them to the mast" framing signals the state's strategy of using AI developers' own public risk statements as evidence that self-restraint has failed. That approach, if credited by the court, gives state attorneys general a template for converting industry safety rhetoric into grounds for equitable relief. Defense counsel, for their part, are likely to argue that a development injunction is an unworkable remedy, that oversight obligations belong to legislatures and federal regulators rather than a single state's trial court, and that the company's willingness to negotiate industry-wide policy cuts against a finding of imminent harm.

The motion remains pending before Judge Beato in the 10th Judicial Circuit.