OpenAI says New York Times demand violates users’ privacy

OpenAI stated in a post to its corporate site: “Trust, security, and privacy guide every product and decision we make. Each week, 800 million people use ChatGPT to think, learn, create, and handle some of the most personal parts of their lives. People entrust us with sensitive conversations, files, credentials, memories, searches, payment information, and AI agents that act on their behalf. We treat this data as among the most sensitive information in your digital life-and we’re building our privacy and security protections to match that responsibility. Today, that responsibility is being tested. The New York Times (NYT) is demanding that we turn over 20 million of your private ChatGPT conversations. They claim they might find examples of you using ChatGPT to try to get around their paywall. This demand disregards long-standing privacy protections, breaks with common-sense security practices, and would force us to turn over tens of millions of highly personal conversations from people who have no connection to the Times’ baseless lawsuit against OpenAI. They have tried this before. Originally, the Times wanted you to lose the ability to delete your private chats. We fought that and restored your right to remove them. Then they demanded we turn over 1.4 billion of your private ChatGPT conversations. We pushed back, and we’re pushing back again now. Your private conversations are yours-and they should not become collateral in a dispute over online content access.”