CHICAGO, IL - A lawsuit filed in federal court in Chicago by a life insurance company against OpenAI is accusing the company’s flagship product, ChatGPT, of practicing law without a license after an ostensible vexatious litigant reportedly used the AI platform to inundate the life insurance company with “meritless” court filings.
On March 4, Nippon Life Insurance Company of America filed a lawsuit claiming it was subjected to a series of “meritless motions, repetitive allegations, and inflammatory characterizations” from a policyholder via the court system following a settlement agreement they’d reached with the policyholder. However, instead of naming the individual allegedly responsible for flooding the courts with these “meritless motions” as a defendant in the lawsuit, the insurance company is going after OpenAI.
According to the life insurance company at the helm of this lawsuit, they’re claiming that their policyholder, with whom they’d reached a prior settlement over a disability dispute years earlier, couldn’t have submitted the numerous subsequent court filings without the assistance of ChatGPT. Nippon is also accusing ChatGPT of tortious interference, practicing law without a license, and abuse of process.
The lawsuit is a first-of-its-kind, accusing a prompt-based AI platform of illegally operating as an attorney, and while AI platforms have generated headlines pertaining to odd outputs in circumstances ranging from police reports to assistance with legal filings, OpenAI says the lawsuit filed against them “lacks any merit whatsoever.”
Attorney and University of Minnesota Law School faculty member Eran Kahana also finds the allegation of unlicensed practice of law lobbed against ChatGPT to be a bit shoddy, citing that said laws were meant to “regulate humans holding themselves out as attorneys.”
Rather, Kahana speculates that a more appropriate legal approach would be a claim regarding product liability, writing, “A design defect exists when a foreseeable risk of harm could have been mitigated by a reasonable alternative design,” further claiming the resulting harm Nippon claims in their suit “was a foreseeable one” due to the then-lacking guardrails of ChatGPT’s output.
Additionally, regarding Nippon’s reliance on its unlicensed practice of law claim levied against OpenAI in the suit, the filing mentions their policyholder over 160 times alongside the actions they personally took in the legal conundrum, with the life insurance company directing blame at an AI chatbot despite the prominent evidence of user agency of the AI tool and ostensible causation gaps.
Nippon is seeking $300,000 in compensatory damages as well as $10 million in punitive damages.
On March 4, Nippon Life Insurance Company of America filed a lawsuit claiming it was subjected to a series of “meritless motions, repetitive allegations, and inflammatory characterizations” from a policyholder via the court system following a settlement agreement they’d reached with the policyholder. However, instead of naming the individual allegedly responsible for flooding the courts with these “meritless motions” as a defendant in the lawsuit, the insurance company is going after OpenAI.
According to the life insurance company at the helm of this lawsuit, they’re claiming that their policyholder, with whom they’d reached a prior settlement over a disability dispute years earlier, couldn’t have submitted the numerous subsequent court filings without the assistance of ChatGPT. Nippon is also accusing ChatGPT of tortious interference, practicing law without a license, and abuse of process.
The lawsuit is a first-of-its-kind, accusing a prompt-based AI platform of illegally operating as an attorney, and while AI platforms have generated headlines pertaining to odd outputs in circumstances ranging from police reports to assistance with legal filings, OpenAI says the lawsuit filed against them “lacks any merit whatsoever.”
Attorney and University of Minnesota Law School faculty member Eran Kahana also finds the allegation of unlicensed practice of law lobbed against ChatGPT to be a bit shoddy, citing that said laws were meant to “regulate humans holding themselves out as attorneys.”
Rather, Kahana speculates that a more appropriate legal approach would be a claim regarding product liability, writing, “A design defect exists when a foreseeable risk of harm could have been mitigated by a reasonable alternative design,” further claiming the resulting harm Nippon claims in their suit “was a foreseeable one” due to the then-lacking guardrails of ChatGPT’s output.
Additionally, regarding Nippon’s reliance on its unlicensed practice of law claim levied against OpenAI in the suit, the filing mentions their policyholder over 160 times alongside the actions they personally took in the legal conundrum, with the life insurance company directing blame at an AI chatbot despite the prominent evidence of user agency of the AI tool and ostensible causation gaps.
Nippon is seeking $300,000 in compensatory damages as well as $10 million in punitive damages.
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