Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier took his campaign against Silicon Valley to South Florida Wednesday, holding a news conference in Miami on artificial intelligence and the tech companies he says are dodging accountability for the harm their products cause.

The Miami appearance follows a Tuesday announcement in Tampa, where Uthmeier laid out a proposal to impose criminal penalties on AI companies whose products “aid or abet” crimes — a plan that would expose firms with what he calls “practical control” over an AI product’s design, training and safety settings to steep fines, victim restitution, court-ordered monitoring and even suspension of their ability to operate in the state.

“These chatbots are designed to mimic human emotions,” Uthmeier said Tuesday. “We’re going to propose criminal sanctions for these companies when their chatbots break the law.”

It’s a notably aggressive posture from a state law enforcement office, and it runs counter to the tech industry’s usual defense — that platforms are neutral tools, not culpable actors. Uthmeier isn’t buying it. His office is already pursuing a criminal investigation into OpenAI, opened after the ChatGPT platform surfaced in the case of Phoenix Ikner, the shooter accused in last year’s mass shooting at Florida State University, and later expanded to include a University of South Florida double homicide in which the suspect allegedly consulted the chatbot about disposing of a body.

Florida Department of Law Enforcement Director Mark Glass added another dimension Tuesday, warning that AI is being used to generate child sexual abuse material — fabricated or not — and that new legislation may be necessary to close the gap. “Child sexual abuse material is dangerous and deeply damaging, even when fabricated,” Glass said.

To be clear, Uthmeier insists this isn’t a push to ban or hobble the technology. “This is not a ban on AI. AI is here, whether we like it or not,” he said. “We want AI to facilitate mankind.” He argued the state has to get ahead of a technology advancing faster than lawmakers can track: “If we don’t get in front of it now as public citizens, as community leaders, as law enforcement, it will be too late.”

That’s a fair point, and one that ought to resonate with anyone who thinks accountability shouldn’t stop at a corporate headquarters in California just because the harm shows up in Tampa or Miami. Multibillion-dollar tech companies have spent years positioning themselves as too innovative, too complex, or too essential to regulate like anyone else. If a product genuinely functions as a tool in a crime, treating the company that built and profited from it differently than any other manufacturer is a harder case to make than Silicon Valley would like.

Still, it’s worth watching how far this goes before applauding too loudly. Handing state prosecutors broad new criminal authority over software design, training data and “safety settings” is the kind of power that’s easy to justify against a company like OpenAI in the wake of a tragedy, and much harder to walk back once it exists as precedent for the next administration, the next targeted industry, or the next fight that has nothing to do with public safety. Uthmeier says any legislation would need a special session or to wait for the regular session in March — which at least gives lawmakers time, not just a press conference microphone, to hash out where the line actually sits between prosecuting bad actors and regulating an entire industry by fiat.

Uthmeier has said he’s already spoken with lawmakers interested in carrying the proposal. Whether it moves as a narrowly targeted crime-and-punishment measure or balloons into a broader regulatory regime for AI in Florida will say a lot about which version of “accountability” the state actually intends to deliver.

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