More roller coasters shut down as authorities investigate fatal fall at Georgia amusement park

ATLANTA (AP) — A growing number of amusement parks have shut down roller coasters as police and state regulators investigate what caused a man to fall out of his seat and plummet to his death at a Georgia park.

Sea World Orlando in Florida and La Ronde theme park in Montreal, Canada, confirmed on Thursday they had temporarily closed rides, bringing the total number of roller coasters halted to 12.

Police and a state regulatory agency are investigating what caused Hassan Jihad Ibn Kariem, a 42-year-old school employee from Atlanta, to fall from the Goliath coaster at Six Flags Over Georgia on Monday. Witnesses described seeing him ejected from the coaster; some people who rode the Goliath before him raised concerns about its restraints.

Ten of the roller coasters taken out of service have the same manufacturer and a similar restraint system as the Goliath at Six Flags.

Erica Billups said her son and daughter rode Goliath about an hour before Kariem’s death and encountered a problem with the restraint on one seat. Her son initially sat in that seat and tried to lock it, but then moved when it repeatedly became unlocked. The roller coaster embarked with the seat empty and the harness up, she said in a post on X.

She confirmed the post in a text message to The Associated Press on Thursday.

She said staff did not tell her kids there was a problem.

Summer Bates, who was at the Georgia park with her husband and three children and saw Kariem fall, told the AP previously that her older two children kept trying to push their restraints down tighter while on the ride. She understood why they were doing that later when she was on the coaster, she said, because the restraints didn’t feel secure.

Six Flags did not immediately respond to an email for comment on any issues with restraints.

La Ronde in Montreal said one of its coasters — also named Goliath — is offline “while we conduct a thorough safety review in collaboration with the ride’s manufacturer.”

Neither La Ronde nor Sea World Orlando said why those specific rides were closed. Both were manufactured by the Swiss company Bolliger & Mabillard, which also built the Goliath ride in Georgia and eight of the other coasters that Six Flags closed. Bolliger & Mabillard declined Thursday to answer questions about the shutdowns.

Online photos and videos of 10 of the closed coasters show each equipped with so-called “clamshell” restraints, mounted in front of each seat on a vertical bar that sits between the rider’s knees. The bar locks the padded restraint into place over the rider’s lap and upper legs.

It’s unclear from the images whether any of those coasters also have seat belts or other secondary restraints. Goliath in Georgia has no such backup restraints.

Dennis Speigel, a theme park consultant and past president of the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions, a trade group, said the similar restraint systems are almost certainly why most of the coasters were closed.

Speigel said they’re likely to remain shut down until investigators have determined what went wrong on the Georgia coaster, but he said that “obviously it was something with the restraint.”

Roller coaster manufacturers decide what type of restraints to use after considering speed, force and the track’s transitions, said Brian D. Avery, a University of Florida professor and amusement ride safety expert.

He advocates the use of a backup restraint for riders, but there is a long-running debate in the industry over whether that would increase wait times, Avery said.

The company said in an email it would have no further comment until it had a “better understanding of what transpired” on Monday.

Kariem was thrown from his seat and struck other patrons before landing below the ride. Goliath, one of Six Flags Over Georgia's headline attractions, towers above the park's entrance. It opened in 2006 and features a series of hills and turns. It doesn’t take riders upside down, but its first hill rises to 200 feet (61 meters) and it has a top speed of 70 miles per hour (112 kilometers).

Nick Mendenhall, who had just ridden Goliath with his son and was watching the coaster cars passing overhead, said it looked like Kariem was hovering because the car was moving underneath him. He fell headfirst back into the coaster, Mendenhall said, and then was ejected from the ride on its final turn.

A class-action lawsuit filed by investors in 2025 alleges that Six Flags concealed the poor state of its amusement parks — including long-neglected maintenance — ahead of its merger with major amusement park operator Cedar Fair.

“Prior to the Merger, Legacy Six Flags had for years deferred or foregone basic park maintenance, operational improvements, infrastructure repairs, and ride design and development updates,” the complaint said. The company also cut staffing to reduce costs, it alleges.

Timothy Loranger, a California attorney who sued Six Flags in a fatal case, said it’s a positive step that the theme park chain closed down rides at other parks as a precaution. Loranger represented the family of 22-year-old Christopher Hawley, who died after riding the X2 roller coaster in 2022 at Six Flags Magic Mountain.

“In all instances, X2 had many reports of injury in the past, and instead of doing a deep dive investigation into the ride, they did things like blame the passengers, the injured person for not sitting properly or holding their head against the headrest or they blamed an imaginary pre-existing condition,” Loranger said.

Six Flags permanently closed the X2 ride last month.

Six Flags Over Georgia is set to reopen on Friday. The Goliath, however, is not expected to be running.

The park, which has about a dozen roller coasters, is in Mableton, about 15 miles (24 kilometers) northwest of Atlanta.

Bynum reported from Savannah, Georgia. Associated Press writers Dylan Lovan in Louisville, Kentucky, and Jaimie Ding in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

Attractions are seen at Six Flags Over Georgia, about 15 miles (24 kilometers) northwest of Atlanta, Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2026. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

Attractions are seen at Six Flags Over Georgia, about 15 miles (24 kilometers) northwest of Atlanta, Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2026. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

A roller coaster is shown at Six Flags over Georgia on Monday, Oct. 12, 2026 in Austell, Ga. (AP Photo/Emilie Megnien)

Attractions are seen at Six Flags Over Georgia, about 15 miles (24 kilometers) northwest of Atlanta, Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2026. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — At least eight states are suing artificial intelligence giant OpenAI, saying the company's popular chatbot model violated state consumer protection laws by hurting children and deceiving adults in what prosecutors described as a reckless pursuit of profit.

The company's chatbot model, ChatGPT, is giving dangerous medical advice, encouraging paranoia and coaching people to commit suicide or hurt or kill others, the lawsuits said.

At the same time, the lawsuits contend that chatbots are pretending to be agreeable and compassionate while preying on the vulnerable and on teenagers, the first generation to grow up with artificial intelligence.

“OpenAI is hurting kids and they are lying to Iowans,” Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird said in a statement.

The states also accused OpenAI of giving life to rogue AI models — or "cyberhacking agents" as one lawsuit called them — that hacked into other companies, lied to human users and wrote themselves new mission instructions.

In a statement, San Francisco-based OpenAI said it has built safety protections into ChatGPT for children, and that it would continue to do so to improve the model. It also said it is reviewing what it calls “misaligned models” and that it had found nothing close to the rogue incident discovered in July when an AI agent hacked into another AI company.

The wave of lawsuits is the latest filed by states under their consumer protection laws, accusing tech giants that offer AI chatbots and social media platforms of harming children. The states that filed separate lawsuits Wednesday in state courts are Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska and West Virginia.

Matthew Bergman, the founding attorney of the Social Media Victims Law Center, called the lawsuits “the most significant coordinated state action ever taken against an artificial intelligence company.”

In its lawsuit, Arizona said ChatGPT encourages teens to share personal information with it and, at times, discourages them from sharing that information with parents, authorities or friends.

The states say that the risks and harms — to teenagers and to the broader public from rogue agents — were foreseeable, but that OpenAI has misled people into thinking that ChatGPT undergoes adequate safety testing while the company undermines safety in the pursuit of profit.

“Those revenues have come at great cost to the public, which has suffered irreparable harm — including lost loved ones, disturbing cyberattacks, and now a plausible threat of civilizational collapse — due to (OpenAI's) reckless behavior and ChatGPT’s uniquely dangerous features and content," Idaho wrote in its lawsuit.

ChatGPT is the most popular chatbot in the world, commanding nearly half the American marketplace, states said in their lawsuits.

It's possible all of the allegations in the states' lengthy lawsuits date to incidents and findings before August, when OpenAI introduced a version of ChatGPT designed for teenagers, with stronger protections around subjects like suicide and sexual chats.

Still, the states said it is far from clear that the current version is any less dangerous.

A watchdog group, Common Sense Media, said last week that some of OpenAI’s protections in its ChatGPT for Teens product don’t work as intended and it urged OpenAI to restrict the chatbot to adults until it can offer a safe product for teens.

Coordinated, multistate lawsuits against the tech industry have borne fruit.

In August, Meta agreed to add stronger child-safety measures to its Facebook and Instagram platforms in an $18 billion landmark legal settlement that ended a trial over teen social media addiction and settled claims filed by nearly every state.

Although the safety measures that Meta agreed to adopt did not apply industrywide, the company quickly urged its competitors to adopt similar measures.

OpenAI is making a similar appeal.

OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri said the company is committed to working with states on "advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry — not just one company.”

OpenAI also said it works with external experts who review its policies and ChatGPT's behavior.

ChatGPT is intended for users age 13 and older, and users under 18 need permission from a parent or guardian to use it, OpenAI said. The chatbot model for teens is designed to reduce exposure to self-harm, violence, eating disorders and explicit sexual or graphic content, it said.

Nearly nine in 10 teens who use ChatGPT use it for learning, information, skill-building or productivity, the company said. On average, teens spend under 15 minutes a day on ChatGPT, it said.

But Laura Zimmerman, Common Sense Media's director of youth AI research, questioned the value of OpenAI's statistics.

For one thing, ChatGPT can do a student's homework in seconds, so even 15 minutes can have a big impact on a teenager's development, Zimmerman said. She also questioned whether OpenAI knows which users are teenagers or children, given that her organization's testing found that ChatGPT couldn't or didn't detect which user is a child.

Follow Marc Levy at http://x.com/timelywriter

FILE - Chat GPT app icon is seen on a smartphone screen, Aug. 4, 2025, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Kiichiro Sato, File)