US State Attorneys General Pursue Product Liability Lawsuits Against AI Chatbot Companies, Echoing Big Tobacco Litigation Strategy

A coordinated litigation strategy modelled on the legal campaigns that defeated the tobacco industry is being deployed against artificial intelligence companies in the United States, with a state attorney general filing suit alleging that AI chatbots cause mental health harms to users. The move, described as the first attorney general action of its kind against AI chatbot companies, parallels the product liability approach already generating thousands of cases against major social media platforms. The suits rely on product liability law — the legal framework that holds manufacturers responsible for foreseeable harms caused by their products — applied to AI-generated outputs and chatbot interactions. Critics of AI regulation at the federal level, including Michelle Lopes Maldonado of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (a think tank whose funders include AI developers such as Anthropic and Alphabet), have acknowledged that this litigation reflects "frustrations that there's not a uniform, cohesive standard at the federal level." The absence of a comprehensive US federal AI liability framework is doing what it did for social media before federal action: driving a fragmented, state-level litigation environment where plaintiffs use existing tort and product liability doctrines to create de facto regulation through the courts. For AI companies operating in or selling into the UK and EU, where the EU AI Act (the European Union's risk-based regulatory framework for artificial intelligence, adopted in 2024) is being implemented, the US litigation trajectory adds a further layer of liability exposure to consider alongside statutory compliance obligations.