A potentially massive class action lawsuit has been lodged against OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing the companies of allegedly misusing people's private information to help create and train its powerful artificial intelligence products.
The lawsuit adds to a growing number of lawsuits leveled against OpenAI and its CEO and co-founder Sam Altman in recent weeks and months in California courts and elsewhere.
On Feb. 27, attorneys with the law firm of Glancy Prongay & Murray LLP, of Los Angeles, filed suit in San Francisco federal court against OpenAI, Microsoft and affiliated companies. The lawsuit, potentially filed on behalf of hundreds of millions of people, accuses OpenAI and its co-defendants of allegedly ignoring federal and California state privacy laws in the development of its GPT group of AIs, including ChatGPT and GPT-4.
The lawsuit asserts OpenAI built and trained its AIs using "web scraping" and other techniques to gather a massive collection of information about people in the U.S. and elsewhere, including children, and to track people's movements and interests, both online and in the physical world.
Further, the lawsuit accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of developing the powerful AIs with little regard for the safety and future of humanity. The lawsuit, for instance, asserts that the creation of the AIs has created a raft of new "unprecedented cybersecurity risks on a global scale." These can include the development of powerfully enhanced malware that can evade virtually all attempts to identify and destroy it; the creation of convincing false information about people and current and historical events, to deceive others; and the potential development of so-called "autonomous weapon" systems, which can target and kill people with no input from human controllers.
"In short, the message is consistent from informed business, nonprofit, and technology thought leaders; industrialists; scientists; world leaders; regulators; and governments around the globe: The proliferation of AI - including Defendants' products - pose an existential threat if not constrained by the reasonable guardrails of our laws and societal mores," the lawsuit said. "Defendants' business and scraping practices raise fundamentally important legal and ethical questions that must also be addressed. Enforcing the law will not amount to stifling AI innovation, but rather a safe and just AI future for all."
The lawsuit asserts OpenAI was founded by Altman, billionaire Elon Musk and others as a non-profit venture intended to create publicly accessible AIs, allegedly for the benefit of humanity.
The lawsuit asserts OpenAI partnered with Microsoft to abandon that model and instead now operates as a commercial venture in pursuit of profit, allegedly regardless of the risks posed by its AI products to the human population and societies.
Those claims echo assertions leveled by Musk in a separate lawsuit against Altman and OpenAI, in which the billionaire owner of Tesla, SpaceX and X Corp. also accused OpenAI's leadership of breaching its contract by essentially coming under the control of Microsoft and developing closed AIs for profit.
The class action lawsuit seeks court orders bringing OpenAI under outside control, to ensure the products are developed and released in a manner that ensures they "follow a code of human-like ethical principles and guidelines and respect for human values and rights."
The class action lawsuit further seeks potentially massive money damages, purportedly to be paid to potentially hundreds of millions of people whose privacy rights were allegedly violated by the development and training of the GPT AIs.
The lawsuit includes demands for several different classes of potential plaintiffs, including several nationwide classes to include different groups of users of ChatGPT and other OpenAI and Microsoft, as well as a nationwide class of non-GPT users whose information allegedly was scraped and used.
The payout demands would also extend to other special state-specific subclasses covering GPT users and non-users in California and New York.
The lawsuit does not specify the amount plaintiffs may seek, but it could include treble statutory damages; actual damages; non-restitutionary disgorgement; and punitive damages.
Attorneys would also seek a large chunk of any payout as fees paid from any such judgment or settlement.
The lawsuit is led by a named plaintiff identified only as A.S., a minor who lives in Florida, and has used ChatGPT, and was allegedly unaware that her data was being collected and used by OpenAI.
Plaintiffs are represented by attorneys Kevin F. Ruf and Brian P. Murray, of the Glancy Prongay & Murray firm, of Los Angeles and New York; and attorney Paul C. Whalen, of Manhasset, New York.