OpenAI is backing an Illinois bill that would shield AI companies from lawsuits over catastrophic harm if they meet safety reporting requirements

OpenAI is backing an Illinois state bill that limits when AI developers can be held liable for catastrophic harm, according to Wired, with liability protection applying only to companies that neither intentionally nor recklessly caused the harm and have made safety and transparency reports publicly available. Illinois Senate Bill 3444 defines “critical harms” as events like the death or serious injury of 100 or more people, $1B or more in property damage, or AI-assisted development of a weapon of mass destruction, and applies to any AI system built on more than $100M in compute, a threshold that would cover OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, xAI, and Meta. OpenAI's support comes as the company faces multiple lawsuits alleging ChatGPT played a role in real-world violence, and as major AI companies including OpenAI, Meta, Alphabet, and Microsoft collectively spent $50M on federal lobbying in the first nine months of 2025.