OpenAI Hit With Class Action Over ‘Unprecedented’ Web Scraping

The generative artificial intelligence company OpenAI LP was hit with a wide-ranging consumer class action lawsuit alleging that company’s use of web scraping to train its artificial intelligence models misappropriates personal data on “an unprecedented scale.”

The nearly 160-page complaint filed Wednesday in a San Francisco federal court said OpenAI’s popular generative AI programs ChatGPT and DALL-E are trained on “stolen private information” taken from what it described as hundreds of millions of internet users, including children, without proper permission.

OpenAI illegally accesses private information from individuals’ interactions with its products and from applications that have integrated ChatGPT, the lawsuit claims. Such integrations allow the company to gather image and location data from Snapchat, music preferences on Spotify, financial information from Stripe, and private conversations on Slack and Microsoft Teams, according to the lawsuit.

The tech company, which is at the forefront of the burgeoning AI industry, is accused of conducting an enormous web scraping operation in secret, violating terms of service agreements and state and federal privacy and property laws. One of the laws cited in the suit is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a federal anti-hacking law that has been invoked in scraping disputes before.

“Despite established protocols for the purchase and use of personal information, Defendants took a different approach: theft,” the complaint said.

The complaint named 16 plaintiffs who used various internet services, including ChatGPT, and who believed their personal information had been stolen by OpenAI.

Microsoft Corp., which is investing $10 billion in OpenAI, was also listed as a defendant.

OpenAI didn’t immediately return a request for comment.

The case is PM v. OpenAI LP, N.D. Cal., No. 3:23-cv-03199, complaint filed 6/28/23.