ChatGPT

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ChatGPT

Basic Information
Release Year	2022
Product Type	Software, Artificial Intelligence, Generative AI, Large Language Models
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. Various iterations of ChatGPT include GPT-3, GPT-4, GPT-4o, and previews of OpenAI-o1, OpenAI-o1 mini and GPT-5.

Consumer-impact summary

Misleading advertising

ChatGPT terms of service say it should not be used to make decisions about people.^{[citation needed]} 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.

Billing and moderation

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.^{[citation needed]}

Privacy

A mobile phone number in a friendly country is required to better track your identity.^{[citation needed]}

Data policy

From OpenAI's data usage policy:^{[citation needed]}

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.

The wording does not detail the extent of conversations shared with OpenAI's trusted service providers.

Incidents

This section is incomplete. This notice can be deleted once all the placeholder text has been replaced.

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 infringement. 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 subscription 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 a justification 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 a user as underage, it will use 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.

Integrated ads (2026)

On January 16, 2026, OpenAI announced that they will be implementing in the US ads for users over 18 that belong to Free and Go tiers. Pro, Business and Enterprise tiers will be exempt from this. These ads will be based on the conversation topic and will appear at the bottom of ChatGPT's messages.

See also

• OpenAI
• Artificial intelligence