SDNY COURTHOUSE, August 17 -- When
Inner City Press asked Pennsylvania's Attorney General in
June for records concerning the office's role in a
national AI-safety coalition and its handling of consumer
complaints about AI chatbots, the response that came back
on July 29 was familiar from this outlet's parallel
requests to other states: five separate categories of
records, five identical citations to the same boilerplate
exemption, applied without variation regardless of what
was actually being withheld.
Records concerning Attorney General Dave
Sunday's leadership of a December 2025 multistate
coalition letter to OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, Google, and
xAI got the same treatment as records concerning active
investigative strategy: a single, unvarying paragraph
citing 65 P.S. § 67.708(b)(17) and Coulter v. Pa. Dept. of
Public Welfare, asserting the material would "reveal the
institution, progress, or result of a[n] investigation."
As to consumer complaints Pennsylvania residents had filed
about AI chatbots — the category bearing most directly on
children and vulnerable users — the office reported
finding nothing at all.
Inner City Press appealed on August 4,
arguing the boilerplate failed the individualized showing
Pennsylvania's Right-to-Know Law requires, and that "no
responsive records" for AI consumer complaints was
difficult to credit at face value, given that identical
requests to Texas, Washington, and New Mexico had each
turned up dozens of matching complaints using the same
search logic. Pennsylvania's response, filed August
10 ahead of a five-business-day deadline the appeals
officer set, was more substantive than what several other
states have offered this outlet on similar requests.
Rather than restating the boilerplate, the OAG submitted a
sworn affidavit from Jesse F. Harvey, Chief Deputy
Attorney General in the Bureau of Consumer Protection,
describing exactly how the search for AI-related
complaints was conducted: the Bureau's case management
system does not support keyword searches for terms like
"artificial intelligence" or "AI," so the search was run
instead against nine specific company names — OpenAI,
ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, Anthropic's
Claude, Meta AI, xAI's Grok, Character.AI, and Replika —
with every matching complaint individually screened
against eight categories of potential harm, from self-harm
and suicidal ideation to deceptive marketing and AI
voice-cloning fraud.
"No results were found," the affidavit
states, and on that basis, "the request was properly not
granted." It is a genuine, specific account, not a
form denial, and Inner City Press said so in its reply,
filed the same afternoon the OAG's submission arrived
rather than waiting out the response window, in order to
press for a faster decision and faster access to whatever
records are eventually released. But the reply also
identifies real gaps the affidavit leaves open. It does
not say whether "data center" was among the search terms,
though the original request's AI category extended to data
center infrastructure complaints as well as chatbot
complaints. It does not address what happens to a consumer
complaint that describes "an AI chatbot" generally without
naming the specific product — precisely the kind of
complaint the system's name-only search structure would
never surface. And it does not disclose how many
complaints referencing the nine named companies exist in
the system at all, as distinct from how many were screened
out as unrelated to the specific harms Category C
described — a distinction that matters, since "no
complaints exist" and "complaints exist but were deemed
unrelated" are very different findings dressed in the same
sentence. More significantly, the affidavit answers
only one of the request's three categories.
It says nothing about the boilerplate
still governing Categories A and B — records concerning
the coalition letter itself, and Pennsylvania's broader AI
enforcement posture — where Inner City Press's reply
presses a distinction the OAG has not yet grappled with: a
difference between coordinating a public advocacy letter
the Attorney General chose to sign and publicize, and
conducting confidential investigative work. Records
showing how other states were recruited to co-sign an
already-public letter, Inner City Press argues, are not
self-evidently the kind of material a
noncriminal-investigation exemption is built to protect,
whatever else in the same production might be. The
stakes, Inner City Press told the Appeals Officer
directly, are not abstract.
This request is one piece of a fifty-state
survey of how state Attorneys General are overseeing AI
companies, and Pennsylvania has positioned itself as a
leader on the issue — Sunday led the December coalition
letter, and the OAG's own July 29 letter describes
Pennsylvania as "a leading participant" in the subsequent
multistate investigation of OpenAI. Whether that
leadership reflects substantive investigation of
documented risks to Pennsylvania consumers, including
children, or primarily consists of public messaging, is
not something the public can assess without the underlying
records. A decision from the Appeals Officer is due by
August 28. Watch this site.
Previously:
The Pennsylvania Attorney General's Office
has responded to a binding public records order requiring
it to produce documents about its Ticketmaster/Live Nation
investigation by filing three sworn affidavits and a
ten-page supplemental legal brief — but no documents. This
amid America 250 celebrations in Philadelphia.
The Right-to-Know Law Officer for the
Pennsylvania OAG issued a Final Determination on June 4,
2026, ordering the office to produce records within thirty
days. That deadline falls on July 4. Rather than comply,
the OAG — now headed by Republican Attorney General David
Sunday — filed on July 2 a new submission arguing, in
essence, that the Final Determination was wrong and that
all responsive records are exempt. Three senior attorneys
in the OAG's Consumer Protection and Antitrust divisions
submitted sworn affidavits in support.
The problem is that the Pennsylvania
Right-to-Know Law does not provide for supplemental
briefing after a Final Determination has issued. It
provides one remedy for an agency that disagrees with a
Final Determination: an appeal to the Commonwealth Court
of Pennsylvania within thirty days. The OAG has not filed
such an appeal. Instead it has done something the law does
not contemplate — re-argued its case to the same officer
whose decision it is legally bound to follow.
Inner City Press sought the records
in connection with its ongoing coverage of the federal
antitrust trial against Live Nation Entertainment, United
States v. Live Nation, 24-cv-03973 (S.D.N.Y.), which
concluded with a jury verdict in April 2026. The
Pennsylvania OAG was a participant in the multi-state
investigation that preceded and ran parallel to the
federal case, having issued a subpoena to Ticketmaster in
February 2023 and joined the federal complaint. The
records Inner City Press sought concern that investigation
— including consumer complaints about ticket pricing and
service fees, and the OAG's own communications about the
investigation's progress. The OAG's new argument — that
all remaining records are shielded by the federal
Antitrust Civil Process Act because some were obtained
through a DOJ Civil Investigative Demand — is a novel and
aggressive claim that the Final Determination did not
address.
The ACPA protects materials that CID
respondents produced to the DOJ from being disclosed to
third parties. It was not designed to let a state AG's
office use a federal investigation as a shield against its
own state public records obligations. Inner City Press has
filed a response with the RTKL Officer asking that the
Final Determination be confirmed as standing, that the
July 4 deadline be enforced, and that the OAG be put on
notice that further non-compliance will be pursued through
the Commonwealth Court — including a potential request for
attorney's fees under the RTKL's fee-shifting provision.
Pennsylvania's Right-to-Know Law exists so that citizens
and journalists can find out what their government has
been doing.
An AG's office that litigates against a
ticketing monopoly on behalf of Pennsylvania consumers,
then files three sworn affidavits to avoid telling those
same consumers what it found, has some explaining to do.
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