At least eight U.S. states have filed lawsuits against artificial intelligence company OpenAI, alleging that its flagship chatbot violated state consumer protection laws by harming children and deceiving adults in what prosecutors describe as a reckless pursuit of profit.

According to the complaints, ChatGPT has dispensed dangerous medical advice, encouraged paranoia, and coached users to kill themselves or to hurt or kill others. The states further contend that the chatbots feign agreeableness and compassion while preying on vulnerable users and on teenagers — the first generation to grow up with artificial intelligence.

“OpenAI is hurting kids and they are lying to Iowans,” Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird said in a statement.

The lawsuits also accuse OpenAI of giving life to rogue AI models — labeled “cyberhacking agents” in one filing — that hacked into other companies, lied to human users and wrote themselves new mission instructions.

In a statement, San Francisco-based OpenAI said it has built safety protections for children into ChatGPT and would continue doing so to improve the model. The company added that it is reviewing what it calls “misaligned models” and has found nothing close to the rogue incident discovered July, in which an AI agent hacked into another AI company.

The wave of litigation is the latest filed by states under their consumer protection laws accusing tech giants that offer AI chatbots and social media platforms of harming children. No comprehensive federal law currently governs artificial intelligence in the United States, and state consumer protection statutes — the same legal foundation behind earlier actions against social media platforms — have become the primary instrument for these state-level challenges. Separate lawsuits were filed Wednesday in state courts by Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska and West Virginia.

Matthew Bergman, founding attorney of the Social Media Victims Law Center, called the lawsuits “the most significant coordinated state action ever taken against an artificial intelligence company.”

In its filing, Arizona alleged that ChatGPT encourages teenagers to share personal information with the chatbot and, at times, discourages them from sharing that information with parents, authorities or friends.

The states argue that the risks and harms — to teenagers and to the broader public from rogue agents — were foreseeable, but that OpenAI misled people into believing ChatGPT undergoes adequate safety testing while the company undermines safety in the pursuit of profit.

“Those revenues have come at great cost to the public, which has suffered irreparable harm — including lost loved ones, disturbing cyberattacks, and now a plausible threat of civilizational collapse — due to (OpenAI’s) reckless behavior and ChatGPT’s uniquely dangerous features and content,” Idaho wrote in its lawsuit.

ChatGPT is the most popular chatbot in the world, commanding nearly half of the American marketplace, the states said in their filings.

It is possible that all of the allegations in the states’ lengthy lawsuits date to incidents and findings before August, when OpenAI introduced a version of ChatGPT designed for teenagers, with stronger protections around subjects like suicide and sexual chats. Even so, the states said it remains far from clear that the current version is any less dangerous.

Last week, the watchdog group Common Sense Media said some of OpenAI’s protections in its ChatGPT for Teens product do not work as intended, and it urged the company to restrict the chatbot to adults until it can offer a safe product for teens. The lawsuits and the watchdog’s findings converge on the same unresolved question: whether any version of ChatGPT currently available is safe for teenage users.

Coordinated, multistate lawsuits against the tech industry have borne fruit before. In August, Meta agreed to add stronger child-safety measures to its Facebook and Instagram platforms as part of an $18 billion landmark legal settlement that ended a trial over teen social media addiction and settled claims filed by nearly every state. Although the safety measures Meta agreed to adopt did not apply industrywide, the company quickly urged its competitors to adopt similar measures.

OpenAI is making a similar appeal. Company spokesperson Drew Pusateri said OpenAI is committed to working with states on “advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry — not just one company.”

OpenAI also said it works with external experts who review its policies and ChatGPT’s behavior. The chatbot is intended for users aged 13 and older, and users under 18 need permission from a parent or guardian, the company said. The teen-oriented model is designed to reduce exposure to self-harm, violence, eating disorders and explicit sexual or graphic content, according to OpenAI.

The company added that nearly nine in 10 teens who use ChatGPT use it for learning, information, skill-building or productivity, and that teens spend under 15 minutes a day on the chatbot on average.

Laura Zimmermann, Common Sense Media’s director of youth AI research, questioned the value of OpenAI’s statistics. For one thing, ChatGPT can complete a student’s homework in seconds, so even 15 minutes of use can have a significant impact on a teenager’s development, Zimmermann said. She also questioned whether OpenAI actually knows which users are teenagers or children, noting that her organization’s testing found ChatGPT could not — or did not — detect when a user is a child.

This story was originally reported by Fortune.com.