Two Days, Three Fronts
On , eight US states sued OpenAI, alleging the company misled the public about the safety of its products. The same day, the European Commission’s AI Office said it had sent OpenAI requests for information covering security, external evaluation, and how model usage is monitored.
A day later, Axios reported that the US FTC had subpoenaed both OpenAI and Anthropic over potential consumer harms.
The private litigation is piling up too. Thirteen new complaints against OpenAI emerged last week, including four from Tech Justice Law on behalf of individuals and minors allegedly harmed by ChatGPT. A proposed class action separately seeks compensation over the misuse of children’s data.
The legal heat lands against a backdrop of public unease. Across five national polls this year, between 55% and 77% of Americans said AI is moving too fast. In Europe, Member of the European Parliament Brando Benifei called the Commission’s withdrawal of the AI Liability Directive a big error
.
Experts Say the Window Is Closing
Specialists argue that AI governance is running behind the technology. Mackenzie Austin of Protect Democracy warned that a handful of executives and officials are making high-stakes decisions
without political accountability, and that the window to change this is closing quickly
.
There is less agreement on what the fix looks like:
- Konstantinos Komaitis, Atlantic Council: governance needs a distributed network of expertise rather than a single global overseer, closer to an Internet-style model.
- Mounir Ibrahim, Truepic: evidence used in AI decisions needs verifiable authenticity, which he sees as crucial to setting deployment conditions.
Hashlytics Take
These three actions come from different bodies with different legal tools, yet they converge on the same question: what happens after a model ships? The states are testing what OpenAI told the public about safety. The AI Office is asking who evaluates the models externally and how usage gets monitored. The FTC is asking about consumer harm. Notably, the FTC subpoenaed Anthropic as well, which suggests regulators are treating this as an industry-wide gap in accountability rather than one company’s problem. The Benifei quote adds the missing piece. With the AI Liability Directive withdrawn in Europe, courts and enforcement agencies are filling a space that legislation left open, and that tends to produce messier, less predictable rules for everyone building these products.
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