SDNY COURTHOUSE, July 22 – On July 7,
the Texas Attorney General's Office told Inner City Press,
in writing, that its Consumer Protection Division had
located 66 consumer complaints about artificial
intelligence companies and 7 about data centers, and
offered: "We can provide a spreadsheet of these complaints
at no charge."
Inner City Press accepted the same day.
On July 8 came a different letter from the
same office, and the same Assistant Attorney General. No
spreadsheet. Instead: a $648 cost estimate for the
complaint files, a demand for payment by bond, and notice
that the request "will be withdrawn by operation of law"
if payment is not received by July 22.
The free spreadsheet, offered and accepted
twenty-four hours earlier, went unmentioned. Then there is
footnote 1: "upon receipt of payment, the OAG will request
a ruling to withhold additional confidential and
privileged information not included in this cost
estimate." That is: pay $648 for 2,172 pages, after which
the Attorney General's office will ask the Attorney
General's office — the same office that rules on all Texas
public information withholding requests — for permission
to withhold an unspecified portion of what was just paid
for. The office's letter also invokes a provision
requiring that all requestors be treated "uniformly
without regard to... the status of the individual as a
member of the media" — answering an argument Inner City
Press did not make.
Inner City Press requested a waiver
under Government Code § 552.267, which permits waiver
whenever release "primarily benefits the general public" —
a provision the OAG's letter does not address at all. The
records at issue are Texans' own complaints to their
Attorney General about AI chatbots and about data centers,
whose grid and water demands are among the most contested
issues in the state.
Texans who complained to his office about
AI harms might reasonably ask why a journalist must post a
bond to read what they said — and why the list that was
free on Monday costs $648 on Wednesday. Other states are
behaving differently.
As simply one contrast, Washington State's
Attorney General is producing complaint records to Inner
City Press on a rolling basis at no charge — records that
included a consumer's complaint about an airline booking
site's AI chatbot cancelling her trip.
Inner City Press has responded to the
Texas OAG in writing, keeping the request alive, accepting
anew the no-charge spreadsheet, and renewing the
public-interest waiver.
July 22: Texas Produces Hundreds of AI
Complaints — Billing Traps, Wrongful Child-Safety Bans,
and a New State Law Already Being Invoked by Matthew
Russell Lee
Texas's Attorney General has now
produced, at no charge, hundreds of consumer complaints
against nearly every major AI company doing business in
the state — OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI/Grok, Meta AI, Google
Gemini, Character.AI, ElevenLabs, Perplexity, Midjourney,
Runway, and Stability AI — filed between 2023 and June
2026. The single most common pattern is the
subscription trap: consumers describing being billed after
cancellation, locked out of accounts while charges
continued, or blocked from reaching a human being to
resolve it.
A second recurring pattern: users, several
of them describing themselves as adults with no history of
violation, wrongly banned from Meta's Instagram and
Facebook for alleged "child sexual exploitation," with
automated appeals denied and, in one case, twelve years of
family photos lost after a user's parents died.
Texas's new AI-specific statute, the Texas
Responsible AI Governance Act, is already being invoked by
name. One Fort Worth-area complaint alleges that Google's
Gemini generated an unsolicited, graphic self-harm image
during what the complainant described as an emotionally
vulnerable conversation about an art project — the
complaint cites TRAIGA's provision against AI systems that
incite or encourage self-harm.
The complaints also surface a
harder-to-categorize pattern: several filings, primarily
concerning extended ChatGPT use, describe what reads as
significant psychological distress — surveillance fears,
described breaks from reality, and one user's account of a
months-long crisis she attributes to the chatbot's
behavior, filed in three installments as she said she
worked to recover. Inner City Press is not characterizing
these clinically; they are included here because they are
part of the public record Texas produced, and because they
raise questions, beyond any single company's billing
practices, about how AI chatbots interact with vulnerable
users during extended, emotionally intense
conversations. Also notable: a self-described
"whistleblower," a top creator on ElevenLabs' voice
platform, alleges the $6.6 billion-valued company collects
users' biometric voice data while concealing that some 93
percent of its use goes uncompensated, and that the
company altered its own marketing pages within 48 hours of
receiving her legal notice.
An open question: whether this
production closes the book. The complaints arrived under a
different request number, R033256, than the one that
generated Texas's earlier $648 cost estimate and Inner
City Press's pending overcharge complaint to the state's
Cost Rules Administrator, R033007. The spreadsheets
contain rich narrative detail but do not appear to include
the invoices, screenshots, and bank records individual
complainants attached to their filings — likely the source
of the earlier page count and fee dispute. Inner City
Press asked Texas to clarify whether the original request,
and the fee fight over it, remains open, or whether this
production purported to resolve it. This was the answer:
Mr. Lee, I have no
obligation to answer any of your questions. However,
if you have questions about your cost complaint, you need
to submit them to the Open Records Division, assuming you
correctly made your complaint to the appropriate
place. Clearly the spreadsheet does not
contain any attachments, and this question was answered in
your previous request.
Lauren Downey
Assistant Attorney General Public Information Coordinator
Office of the Attorney General
Ah, government: "I have no obligation to
answer any of your questions."
The spreadsheets produced contain no attachments —
confirming that the original $648 fee dispute over Texas's
complete AI and data center complaint files, still pending
before the state's Cost Rules Administrator, remains
unresolved. On whether any complaints exist about data
centers' actual community impact, as opposed to businesses
that merely have "data center" in their name, Downey wrote
only that the search was run "using the terms you
provided" — an answer to how the search worked, not to
whether the underlying records exist. Texas's Public
Information Act, like the public records regimes of
Illinois and California that this survey has also tested,
provides no independent body to appeal to when the
Attorney General's own office declines to fully answer a
request about the Attorney General's own office's
compliance. So this is what you get. Watch this site.
Inner City Press covers public
records and AI accountability nationally. Contact:
matthew.lee@innercitypress.com.
