OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, has been hit with a class action lawsuit alleging that it stole peoples’ data to develop its artificial intelligence (A.I.) applications.
The class action suit, filed in a California federal court, claims that OpenAI scraped massive amounts of personal data from the internet to train its A.I. programs and tools, including the popular ChatGPT chatbot.
The 160-page legal complaint alleges that the personal data stolen by OpenAI includes every piece of data exchanged on the internet that the company could get its hands on, and that data was seized by the company without notice, consent, or compensation.
Microsoft (MSFT), which has invested $10 billion U.S. into OpenAI and integrated ChatGPT into its Bing search engine, has been named a co-defendant in the lawsuit.
The class action also claims that OpenAI’s products “use stolen private information, including personally identifiable information, from hundreds of millions of internet users, including children of all ages, without their informed consent or knowledge.”
The lawsuit seeks a temporary freeze on any further commercial use of OpenAI’s artificial intelligence products, as well as financial compensation in the form of “data dividends” to people whose information was used by OpenAI without their consent.
OpenAI publicly launched ChatGPT last fall, and the A.I. chatbot has since gone viral around the world.
The success of ChatGPT has led to what’s being called an “A.I. arms race” among top technology companies such as Alphabet (GOOGL) and Nvidia (NVDA), among others.
Neither OpenAI nor Microsoft have publicly commented on the class action lawsuit.
Microsoft’s stock has risen 43% this year to $341.27 U.S. per share. OpenAI is a private company, and its stock does not trade on a public exchange.
