FEDERAL COURTHOUSE, July 14 – Illinois
Attorney General Kwame Raoul's office promotes its
leadership on artificial intelligence: joining the
multistate front on OpenAI, on AI and child safety, on
deepfakes.
So Inner City Press asked his office, under
Illinois FOIA, a simple question its counterparts across
the country have answered: what have Illinois consumers
complained about, regarding eight named AI companies and
data centers, in the last year?
On July 14, the answer came: nothing.
Denied in full, not one document. Letter on Inner City
Press' DocumentCloud here.
The office's reasons deserve preservation.
It "does not docket consumer complaints in such a way that
would allow a search... by topic," and with 18,000
complaints a year, staff "would be required to manually
review complaints" — too burdensome under Section 3(g).
Except Inner City Press did not ask for a
topic; it asked by company name — OpenAI, Anthropic,
Character.AI, Replika and the rest — the very field a
complaint system indexes, since consumers complain about
companies. Asked the question, Washington is producing on
a rolling basis — including the complaint of a consumer
whose trip an airline site's AI chatbot cancelled. New
Mexico produced complete files. Maryland is on schedule.
Illinois — whose AG issues the press
releases — either cannot search its own complaint database
by the name of the company complained about, which is an
incompetence problem, or will not, which is a transparency
problem.
The denial's procedural logic is its own
exhibit: the office suggested narrowing to "specific
entities in a one-year period"; Inner City Press narrowed
to exactly that on June 29; the office then denied that
narrowed request — for failure to respond to its
invitation to narrow. Inner City Press has filed a Request
for Review with the Public Access Counselor — the review
bureau housed, as Illinois would have it, inside the
Attorney General's own office, where a second Inner City
Press review of a Raoul office denial, concerning Live
Nation records the office calls simultaneously nonexistent
and exempt, is already pending. The AG's office reviewing
the AG's office, twice over. We'll have more on this.
Watch this site.
