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OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, sued for stealing private data

Written by Sanjana Shankar
June 29, 2023

A proposed class action lawsuit has been filed against OpenAI

OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, has landed in legal trouble.The company is being sued for stealing and misusing vast amounts of sensitive user information from the internet without the "consent" of the users. The allegation is that the stolen data is being used to train AI tools.A proposed class action lawsuit has been filed against OpenAI in a California federal court.

The company is accused of stealing "private" information from millions

According to CNN, the lawsuit alleges that OpenAI products use "stolen private information, including personally identifiable information, from hundreds of millions" of users including "children of all ages" without "informed consent or knowledge."The company is claimed to have stolen "essentially every piece of data exchanged on the internet."The charges have been pressed by Clarkson, a law firm in California.

'OpenAI put everyone in a zone of risk that's incalculable'

"By collecting previously obscure personal data of millions and misappropriating it to develop a volatile, untested technology, OpenAI put everyone in a zone of risk that is incalculable-but unacceptable by any measure of responsible data protection and use," said Timothy Giordano, from Clarkson, to CNN.

Microsoft has also been mentioned as defendant in the lawsuit

The filed complaint, which runs about 160 pages long, claims that the data extraction happened at an "unprecedented scale." It further accuses OpenAI of risking "civilizational collapse."Microsoft, who is a key partner of OpenAI, has also been mentioned as a defendant in the lawsuit.Till now, neither OpenAI nor Microsoft have responded to the allegations.