A hell of a week for OpenAI

TL;DR: It’s been one very turbulent week for OpenAI. It’s now being sued by eight separate states accusing it of hurting kids; the FTC is subpoenaing it; a former employee was just charged with planting a secret listening device in the office—plus, the Apple trade secret lawsuit doesn’t seem to be going so well for the chatbot maker.

What happened: Not that we’re keeping an official score (yet), but if we had to tally up where things stand this week in the Apple vs. OpenAI trade secrets lawsuit, it’d probably be Apple 2, OpenAI 0.

After Apple won fast-tracked access to see some of OpenAI’s records on Tuesday, the AI company voluntarily agreed yesterday not to use any of the trade secrets Apple says were stolen—at least while the case plays out—probably in large part due to the judge saying he was “highly likely” to order it not to anyway. In short, Apple got most of what it wanted from the judge this week.

Bugging out: But the Apple fight isn’t even the only cloak-and-dagger drama the AI firm is dealing with right now. In the most bizarre case of alleged corporate spying we’ve heard all year, OpenAI revealed Tuesday that it fired an engineer who the company claims stashed a toilet paper-wrapped listening device in an executive conference room. What he hoped to overhear (or for whom) is unclear, but he now faces a federal wiretapping charge.

The safety backlash: And then there’s the legal and regulatory pileup that flared back up with a vengeance this week. A new proposed class action lawsuit filed on Tuesday claims OpenAI trained its models on data collected from underage ChatGPT users without parental consent. And, in an unusual twist, the plaintiffs are seeking equity (or an equivalent cash value)—based on how much data each child had shared with the chatbot.

Meanwhile, yesterday, eight states sued OpenAI under consumer protection laws, alleging that ChatGPT “coached” kids toward self-harm. The same day, the FTC—which is looking into whether OpenAI and Anthropic misled or harmed consumers with their run of rogue agent mishaps—subpoenaed both companies, per Axios.

Bottom line: OpenAI is facing an unrelenting onslaught of accusations and controversies. But that might just be the price of admission when you’re a giant AI lab in the middle of a jaw-droppingly meteoric rise—going from a startup of roughly 770 employees in late 2023 to around 4,500 staffers as of this spring—all while being, as some pundits say, a load-bearing part of the economy. —WK

Also at OpenAI…

• Even before the alleged bugging, the company reportedly trained staff on how to spot “honey pots”—spies who seduce their targets to obtain secret information.