The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has opened an investigation into OpenAI Inc., questioning whether its popular ChatGPT conversational AI bot puts consumers’ reputations and data at risk, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The probe into the Microsoft Corp.-backed startup marks the first official inquiry into a technology that has the potential to change almost every aspect of people’s lives and has become almost equally as fascinating for its potential to run awry. FTC Chair Lina Khan, who testified before Congress Thursday, has raised concerns about AI before, saying enforcers “need to be vigilant early” with transformative tools like artificial intelligence. Microsoft and OpenAI declined to comment. The Washington Post earlier reported on the FTC’s probe.
The FTC’s investigation opens a potent regulatory salvo at San Francisco-based OpenAI, the leader in generative AI technology whose ChatGPT app has sparked a race among companies across nearly every industry to develop their own competing chatbots. ChatGPT is built atop a large language model, which is trained on enormous swaths of text from the internet so that it can generate responses to questions in a way that sounds human-like.
The rapid rise of the technology in the past eight months since ChatGPT become widely available, has prompted calls for regulation and a pause in training of advanced AI systems.