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ChatGPT just got called into the principal's office, except the principal is 42 state attorneys general at once.
Last Friday (June 12), New York Attorney General Letitia James served OpenAI with a subpoena on behalf of a 42-state coalition. It's the broadest legal investigation any state government has launched against an AI company, and it's only the latest entry in OpenAI's growing legal file.
Here's what happened
- The subpoena demands records on OpenAI's advertising, how it keeps users engaged, and how it handles consumer and health data
- Investigators also want details on how ChatGPT treats minors and seniors, plus its "sycophancy" (when a chatbot tells you what you want to hear instead of what's true or safe)
- The probe lands about a week after OpenAI confidentially filed paperwork for an IPO that could value the company at nearly $1 trillion
- It piles onto Florida's lawsuit from earlier this month, an 83-page complaint naming CEO Sam Altman personally, which grew out of an April criminal probe tied to a Florida State University shooting
- OpenAI says it's cooperating "constructively" with the new investigation
Why this matters
This has been building for months.
Back in December, the same 42-state coalition sent a joint warning letter to OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, Google, and xAI, urging them to implement safeguards for vulnerable chatbot users. Six months later, OpenAI is first in line for the subpoena.
The features under scrutiny are the same ones that make ChatGPT useful every day: the engagement hooks, the memory of your chats, and the agreeable tone. If regulators rein in how "agreeable" a chatbot is allowed to be, the product that 800 million weekly users rely on could feel noticeably different.
The timing also stings. Investigations of this size have to be disclosed in a company's S-1 (the paperwork filed before going public), adding a new risk factor for investors, right as Anthropic also filed confidentially for its own roughly $965 billion IPO last week.
Our take
"Sycophancy" might end up being 2026's defining AI regulation buzzword.
It's the first major probe focused on how a chatbot behaves, not just what it does with your data. Then again, a subpoena is a request for documents, not a verdict, and OpenAI sounds more like a company doing damage control than one bracing for impact. Either way, expect a lot more people to actually read their ChatGPT terms of service this week.
Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on our sister publication, The Neuron.