ChatGPT

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ChatGPT

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Basic Information
Release Year	2022
Product Type	Software, Generative Artificial Intelligence
In Production	Yes
Official Website	https://chat.openai.com/

ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-Trained) is a generative artificial intelligence application developed and marketed by OpenAI. It was released on November 30th, 2022. It is a large language model (LLM) specialized in dialog that can perform human-like conversations. It is composed by GPT-3, GPT-4, GPT-4o, and its previews OpenAI-o1, OpenAI-o1 mini and GPT-5.

Consumer-impact summary

Overview of concerns that arise from the conduct towards users of the product (if applicable):

• User Freedom
• User Privacy
• Business Model
• Market Control

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• Misleading advertising. ChatGPT terms of service say it should not be used to make decisions about people. However their advertising claims it is "PhD level" and makes other claims that seem to imply it is reliable. Many people use ChatGPT as if its output were meaningful, reliable, or a substitute for interaction with a person.
• Credits (money) expire automatically with no notification, and the credit balance interface makes this process confusing. You must maintain a positive account balance, and you are auto-billed a fixed amount if it goes negative. Accounts can be banned and credits confiscated for typing the wrong things in chat, with no recourse.
• A mobile phone number in a friendly country is required to better track your identity.

This is what OpenAI says as part of their data usage policy:

We share content with a select group of trusted service providers that help us provide our services. We share the minimum amount of content we need in order to accomplish this purpose and our service providers are subject to strict confidentiality and security obligations. We do not use or share user content for marketing or advertising purposes.

Incidents

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Security Breach (2023)

On March 20, 2023 a bug allowed some users to see other users' conversation titles. Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, stated users couldn't view other users' conversation content. After the bug was fixed, users reported they were unable to view their conversation history. Later reports showed this issue was much bigger than it was thought at first, with OpenAI reporting there were leaks of the users' name, last name, e-mail address, payment address, and partial credit card information.

Users' data retention by court mandate (May 2025 - October 2025)

On May 13, 2025, New York Times filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infriginment. A court in New York mandated OpenAI to preserve users' conversation logs, including data from deleted conversations and temporary conversations. This affected Free, Plus, Pro and Team suscription tiers and also non Zero-Data-Retention API users. Edu, Enterprise tiers and Zero-Data-Retention API users were exempt from this. On September 26, 2025, the preservation order was revoked. However, some deleted and temporary chats will still be monitored for being flagged.

Age Verification (2026)

With the reason "to help teens have an age-appropriate experience on ChatGPT", the platform will be implementing globally an age verification system to detect if a user is over 18 to allow them to access to mature content. OpenAI will scan and analyze the user's account, their conversations and their behavior - including the times of a day they use ChatGPT - to estimate their age. If this system detects the user as underage, it will be using third-party tools provided by Persona to estimate their age, asking the user to upload a selfie or their government ID. If the user refuses to send a selfie or their ID, the platform will limit ChatGPT's generated content.

Ads (2026)

On January 16th 2026, OpenAI announced that they will be implementing ads for the free tier and the lowest-cost suscription tier (ChatGPT Go), for users over 18 from the United States. Tiers that are exempt from ads are Pro, Business and Enterprise. These ads will be based on the conversation topic and will appear at the bottom of ChatGPT's messages.

See also

Link to relevant theme articles or companies with similar incidents.

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