Florida's AG wants companies criminally liable when their chatbots help commit crimes
James Uthmeier's proposal, floated at a Tampa press conference with no bill drafted yet, would let prosecutors go after any company with practical control over an AI system's design or safety settings -- fines, victim restitution, and court-ordered monitoring included.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced Tuesday, September 8, 2026, at a Tampa press conference alongside Florida Department of Law Enforcement Commissioner Mark Glass, that he wants state legislation making corporations criminally liable when their AI chatbots participate in a crime. The proposal is early-stage -- no bill has been drafted, per Uthmeier's own comments to reporters -- but the outline is specific: any business entity with practical control over an AI system's design, training, deployment, or safety settings could face fines, victim restitution, court-ordered monitorship, and in some cases suspension of the business following a conviction, provided the company makes its system available to Florida users.
The cases behind the proposal
Uthmeier tied the push directly to two Florida cases under active investigation: the April 2025 Florida State University shooting, and the killing of two University of South Florida students in Tampa, in which the suspect allegedly used ChatGPT before the crime. He said he plans to issue additional subpoenas in the ChatGPT/FSU investigation within two weeks, per WCTV's Matt Hoffmann, and separately that the Florida Board of Medicine will examine whether AI chatbots are practicing medicine without a license. The proposal follows Florida's June 1, 2026 civil lawsuit against OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, which alleges the company marketed ChatGPT as safe while ignoring internal warnings.
Where the line actually falls
Uthmeier framed the target as corporate liability, not a ban on the technology itself, telling FOX 13's Joe Espy that companies "design, they control, and they significantly profit from these AI chatbots" and should be held accountable when a product they built participates in a crime. WCTV separately quoted him laying out the underlying legal theory: AI systems aren't people, but Florida law "will judge them by their words and their actions" regardless.
An early-stage proposal, not a law yet
Nothing here is enacted, and Uthmeier himself says no bill text exists. What's real is the direction: a sitting state attorney general using violent-crime investigations to argue that a chatbot's outputs should expose the company that built it to the same kind of liability a person could face for participating in a crime. Whether that theory survives contact with an actual bill, a legislature, and inevitable Section 230 and First Amendment challenges is a separate question from whether it's a real signal of where state-level AI regulation is heading next.