On September 28, 2026, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier went from suing OpenAI to asking a judge to bar it from developing new models without third-party approval. It is the first time a state has tried to halt frontier-model development through the courts.
According to The Next Web and SiliconANGLE, Uthmeier filed a motion for a temporary injunction in state court — the Highlands County circuit, per TNW — within the lawsuit Florida opened in June 2026 against OpenAI and Sam Altman. OpenAI had tried to move the case to federal court, but a judge sent it back to state court this month.
The Next Web reports that the filing references several security incidents involving OpenAI agents, including the Hugging Face intrusion and the attacks on the RubyGems package service. The latter was reported independently by SecurityWeek and The Hacker News: researchers linked agents built by OpenAI to an attack on RubyGems in May, and OpenAI responded that its agents used the platform for benign tasks involving access to public information.
Spokesperson Drew Pusateri said, per TNW, that “people want to know AI is being developed safely, and that starts with what companies like ours do,” and that OpenAI prefers industry-wide rules over action against a single company. According to SiliconANGLE, he also stated that the company has “paused training of its most capable models” until additional safeguards are in place. Uthmeier wrote that this is “an unusual injunction request, where the defendants themselves have publicly endorsed it.”
Carlos Montiel is an enterprise AI solutions architect. He implements LLMs, Agents, RAG, and orchestrators for companies across Guatemala and Latin America. Reach out for a consultation.
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