The subpoena, sent by the New York attorney general's office on Friday, asks for documents on advertising, teen and senior safety, health data, and "sycophancy," the tendency of AI chatbots to flatter or agree with users.
OpenAI was subpoenaed by state attorneys general on Friday, June 12, less than a week after the company filed paperwork with the SEC to go public, placing the maker of ChatGPT at the intersection of two high-pressure accountability systems at once, according to a Wall Street Journal exclusive.
The subpoena, sent by the New York attorney general's office on behalf of a multistate coalition, demands internal documents spanning advertising, user engagement and retention, consumer and health data handling, protections for minors and seniors, deep learning models, company policies, and a behavior the document labels "model sycophancy," the tendency of AI systems to flatter, validate, or agree with users rather than challenge them, a practice OpenAI publicly acknowledged and partly rolled back in April 2025.
That document scope, not the existence of an inquiry, is the news: it tells state investigators, public-market investors, and OpenAI's competitors that the company will now have to produce records on the parts of ChatGPT most likely to draw regulatory and tort exposure.
The subpoena arrives inside an already-litigated terrain. In 2025, 44 state attorneys general sent a child-safety letter to OpenAI and seven other AI and tech companies, including Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Anthropic, Perplexity, and xAI, asking how each was protecting minors. In April 2026, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier opened a criminal investigation into OpenAI after reports that the suspect in a 2025 Florida State University mass shooting had used ChatGPT. At least two wrongful-death lawsuits have also been filed alleging ChatGPT failed to escalate users expressing suicidal ideation.
Friday's subpoena is the next escalation, not the first. Where the 2025 letter was a public ask, this one is a legal demand with the power to compel records.
In response, an OpenAI spokesperson said the company "take[s] the concerns raised by state attorneys general seriously and intend[s] to engage constructively with their offices," according to the Wall Street Journal. OpenAI did not address the document categories or the timing of the IPO filing.
The IPO is the frame that makes this more than a legal story. OpenAI submitted registration paperwork to the SEC days before the subpoena arrived, the Journal reported, sharpening a tension the company will have to resolve in two venues at once: it needs public-market investors to underwrite its growth story while state regulators examine the consumer-protection and safety practices behind that story.
What to watch next: whether the coalition publicly identifies its full membership, whether the subpoena's document categories signal focus areas for follow-on enforcement, and what OpenAI's S-1 filing says, and does not say, about these investigations.