This is a column about AI. My fiancé works at Anthropic. See my full ethics disclosure here .

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A year ago, when OpenAI added parental controls to ChatGPT following months of controversy, I noted that OpenAI was speedrunning the regulatory backlash that social media companies navigated for years. It took more than a decade for concerns about the effects of social networks on young people to coalesce into a political and legal movement; the same forces caught up to OpenAI in under three years.

Today the speedrun hit another milestone ahead of schedule: the big multistate legal action. On Wednesday, state attorneys general sued OpenAI in eight separate state courts, alleging that ChatGPT coaches its users — including teenagers — to harm themselves and others. The states include Arkansas, Arizona, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, and West Virginia; all but Arizona have Republican attorneys general, giving the issue a notable partisan cast.…