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PRESS RELEASE: EPIC Files Complaint Urging the FTC to Investigate OpenAI’s GPTs and Third-Party APIs

October 29, 2024

In a complaint filed today, EPIC called on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate OpenAI for failing to meet established public policy standards for responsible AI use and development, offering products with unsafe security, privacy, and business practices, perpetuating unfair and deceptive practices in their product development and release, and causing significant consumer harm.  

OpenAI develops, operates, and markets generative AI products to millions of consumers and third-party AI deployers. While it claims to advance “safe and beneficial” AI, it has utterly failed to show evidence that its products meet even the few responsible development and use standards put forth, including Executive Order 14110 on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of AI and the White House’s Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights. With no evidence of responsible development on display and increasingly serious examples of harms perpetuated by its products, EPIC has filed this complaint calling for an investigation. 

“The generative AI boom promised that it could create all kinds of benefits to society. Thus far, it has created a mass data-stealing regime and countless privacy, human rights, data security, and accuracy problems. The hypothetical benefits do not outweigh the actual harms and OpenAI must be accountable for what their product is actually doing – not what they hope it will do,” said Calli Schroeder, Senior Counsel, Global Privacy Counsel, and lead of the AI and Human Rights Project at EPIC. 

The complaint builds on the FTC’s previously launched investigations into OpenAI’s product development, use, and business practices by calling attention to OpenAI’s third-party API integrations and partnerships and how these exacerbate existing privacy, data protection, and human rights concerns. Further, OpenAI products are now being integrated into high-risk industries like real estate and financial services where the consequences of incorrect or biased technology processing can be devastating for consumers. 

As the complaint states, “OpenAI has collected scores of consumer data and produced unsafe AI models in order to enrich itself—without passing on any noticeable benefits to consumers or competition that would not remain with more protective data collection, AI development, and risk management practices in place.” 

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About EPIC

EPIC has played a leading role in developing the authority of regulators to safeguard the rights of consumers, ensure the protection of personal data, and address AI harms. EPIC previously called attention to Thomson Reuter’s error-prone fraud detection system in two investigative reports: Outsourced & Automated and Screened & Scored in the District of Columbia. EPIC has continuously drawn attention to the harms perpetuated by generative AI systems in its Generating Harms reports. 

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