Yahoo Finance ChatGPT owner hit by class action lawsuit over alleged stolen data
The owner of ChatGPT and Microsoft have been hit by a $3bn (£2.4bn) class action lawsuit over the alleged theft of data from hundreds of millions of internet users.
The legal claim alleges OpenAI, which built the digital chatbot, and investor Microsoft developed the artificial intelligence tools by “secret scraping of the internet”.
The companies were sued by sixteen anonymous individuals in California and accused of a series of privacy violations, including the theft of private and copyrighted information and “luring thousands if not millions of children to the platform”.
ChatGPT provides human-sounding responses to questions and prompts. Other tools developed by OpenAI can be used to create digital artworks. The AI tools have surged in popularity as a way to automate tasks.
The legal claims accuse OpenAI of hoovering up personal and copyrighted information by indiscriminately scraping the web, including names, contact details, emails, payment data and social media profiles without consent.
The accusers claim OpenAI used this information to train its AI chatbot. They also allege the company allowed children to access its service and collected their information in violation of US law by failing to offer proper parental consent tools.
The class action claim has demanded $3bn from the tech companies, based on the hundreds of dollars in personal information allegedly stolen from people across the US.
The legal action adds the companies showed a “disregard for the potentially catastrophic risk to humanity” when developing their tools, which some experts contend could pose an existential risk to mankind.
Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, has called for regulation of AI products. The ChatGPT creator has received billions of dollars in investment from tech giant Microsoft.
The case is ongoing. OpenAI has been contacted. Microsoft declined to comment.
