OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, hit with proposed class action lawsuit alleging it stole people's data

CNN — OpenAI, the company behind the viral ChatGPT tool, has been hit with a lawsuit alleging the company stole and misappropriated vast swaths of peoples’ data from the internet to train its AI tools.

The proposed class action lawsuit, filed Wednesday in a California federal court, claims that OpenAI secretly scraped “massive amounts of personal data from the internet,” according to the complaint. The nearly 160-page complaint alleges that this personal data, including “essentially every piece of data exchanged on the internet it could take,” was also seized by the company without notice, consent or “just compensation.”

Moreover, this data scraping occurred at an “unprecedented scale,” the suit claims.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment Wednesday. Microsoft, a major investor into OpenAI, was also named as a defendant in the suit and did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“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,” Timothy K. Giordano, a partner at Clarkson, the law firm behind the suit, said in a statement to CNN Wednesday.