OpenAI on Friday said it intends to “engage constructively” with state attorneys general and will take their concerns “seriously,” a spokesperson told CNBC.

The company’s statement landed after The Wall Street Journal reported that a coalition of state attorneys general opened an investigation into the artificial intelligence company. OpenAI was reportedly served with a subpoena seeking information about its approach to advertising, consumer and health data, minor and senior users and models, among other activities.

“AI is a new and powerful technology, and we work every day to safely bring its benefits to people in a responsible way,” the spokesperson said.

OpenAI rocketed into the mainstream in 2022 following the launch of its chatbot ChatGPT, which now supports more than 1 billion monthly active users.

The company has ballooned into one of the most valuable private companies on the planet, reaching a valuation of $850 billion earlier this year. OpenAI is now gearing up for an IPO that could land as soon as this year, announcing on Monday that it confidentially filed its prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

But along with the company’s meteoric rise has come mounting legal woes over purported harms caused by its technology.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier sued OpenAI earlier this month, alleging that the company knowingly released an unsafe product, namely ChatGPT, that could harm users. Uthmeier said during a press conference at the time that he expected other states to take similar action.

The company is being sued by seven families of the victims of the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting, which took place in Canada in February. The families allege that the attacker used ChatGPT to plan the attack, and that the company did not do anything to stop it.

OpenAI is also facing a number of wrongful death lawsuits, which allege that ChatGPT drove users to experience harmful delusions and, in some cases, to commit suicide. 

“Today’s ChatGPT includes a more protective experience for minors and people experiencing difficult situations, with safeguards that direct them to real-world resources and trusted human contacts,” OpenAI’s spokesperson said Friday.

If you are having suicidal thoughts or are in distress, contact the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 for support and assistance from a trained counselor.

WATCH: OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor: Heartened everyone is taking AI regulation seriously

As the leaders of the world’s two most powerful economies rekindled personal ties in Beijing on Thursday and Friday, with a cavalcade of American business leaders accompanying U.S. President Donald Trump, the Chinese capital turned into something of a spectacle.

The visit — the first by a sitting U.S. president to China in nearly a decade — was full of friendly overtures, closely orchestrated pageantry, business dealmaking, and headline-grabbing sideshows that captivated audiences on both sides of the Pacific.

Beijing deployed its diplomatic arsenal to the full.

It laid on brass bands and flower-waving schoolchildren at the airport, a state banquet at the Great Hall of the People, a private tour of the Temple of Heaven, and a closing garden stroll at Zhongnanhai – the walled compound where China’s top leaders have worked and lived since 1949 – during which Chinese President Xi Jinping offered Trump rose seeds as a parting gift. 

“There were unusually long handshakes, back-patting, smiling, and synchronized walking during public appearances,” said Lyle Morris, senior fellow for foreign policy and national security at the Asia Society Policy Institute. “The interaction was warmer and more relaxed than some previous Trump-Xi encounters,” Morris said. 

Crowds gathered along streets near the Four Seasons hotel and the Great Hall for a glimpse of Trump’s motorcade. “It was quite a spectacle,” said Alicia Liao, a university student in Beijing. “We had an exam the next day, but almost everyone followed the broadcast or social media clips.”  

Amazon‘s data center in Bahrain was targeted by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps for the company’s support of the U.S. military, Iranian state media said Wednesday.

The company’s cloud computing unit said Monday that one of its facilities in Bahrain was damaged due to a nearby drone strike on Sunday. Two data centers in the United Arab Emirates were also damaged after they were “directly struck” by drones.

All of the facilities remain offline, according to the Amazon Web Services health dashboard.

The attack in Bahrain was launched “to identify the role of these centers in supporting the enemy’s military and intelligence activities,” Iran’s Fars News Agency said on Telegram.

The incidents came after joint U.S.-Israel strikes on Iran over the weekend. Iran has retaliated against Israeli and U.S. bases across the Gulf.

Amazon declined to comment.

In addition to structural damage, the data centers also experienced power disruptions and some water damage after firefighters worked to put out sparks and fire. Some popular AWS applications experienced “elevated error rates and degraded availability” due to the incident.

AWS advised cloud customers to back up their data, consider migrating their workloads to other regions and direct traffic away from Bahrain and the UAE.

AWS announced its Bahrain region in 2019, and it hosts significant workloads for governments there. The company also operates a corporate office in Bahrain that is primarily for AWS employees.

Earlier this week, Amazon instructed all of its corporate employees in the Middle East to work remotely and “follow local government guidelines” amid escalating instability in the region.

BEIJING — U.S. President Donald Trump avoided directly naming China in his State of the Union address Tuesday, just weeks before his scheduled trip to Beijing.

In what was the longest State of the Union (SOTU) speech by any U.S. president, Trump covered a range of topics from inflation and tariffs to stock market records.

But notably, he did not directly mention China, other than a reference to “Russian and Chinese military technology” that guarded Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro during the operation that led to the capture of the foreign leader.

During Trump’s first term from 2017 to 2021, he made direct references to the Chinese nation in all three of his State of the Union addresses. The remarks had largely highlighted the threat from Beijing to the U.S.

“Trump doesn’t want to pick a fight with China in an election year,” said Gabriel Wildau, managing director, Teneo, referring to the coming U.S. midterm elections in November.

“Stability in U.S.-China relations is a priority for the president at least this year and potentially for the rest of his term,” Wildau said.

In order to maintain that relationship, Trump plans to visit Beijing from March 31 to April 2, the first trip by a U.S. president since 2017.

But China’s foreign ministry has yet to confirm exact dates for the visit, pointed out George Chen, partner at The Asia Group. “That makes Trump look more desperate to visit China more than how much [Chinese president Xi Jinping] wants to host him.”

“The lack of mentions about China in Trump’s speech is another example to show how Trump stays cautious now about U.S.-China relations,” Chen said.

China and the U.S. ratcheted up tariffs on each others’ goods last spring to well over 100%, before reaching a trade truce in October to bring tariffs below 50% for the next year. Beijing also tightened its restrictions on rare earths exports worldwide. The Asian country dominates the global supply chain for rare earths, critical minerals used in a swath of technologies.

“The state of the union showed Trump thinks glorifying U.S. military triumphs over weak states like Venezuela makes better election year politics than fighting with China over rare earths,” Wildau said.

Uncertainty around tariffs picked up over the weekend after the U.S. Supreme Court last week struck down tariffs that Trump had imposed on a swath of countries last year. Trump then quickly pointed to an alternative basis for raising the global tariff rate.

In social media posts on Weibo, two Chinese state media outlets highlighted opposition within Congress to Trump’s speech. Local attention in China to Trump’s address was otherwise muted.

Trump’s limited mention of China also reflects how unpredictable his policy on Beijing can be, said Yue Su, principal economist at the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).

“By contrast, [Democrat U.S. President Joe] Biden consistently referred to China in his speeches, which underscored a degree of continuity and predictability in his China policy,” she said, referring to Trump’s predecessor.

The Democratic Party’s rebuttal to Trump’s State of the Union Tuesday focused directly on Beijing.

“But as the president spoke of his perceived successes tonight, he continues to cede economic power and technological strength to Russia, bow down to China, bow down to a Russian dictator and make plans for war with Iran,” said Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger, who gave the rebuttal.