Italy temporarily bans ChatGPT over privacy concerns

“The Italian SA imposed an immediate temporary limitation on the processing of Italian users’ data by OpenAI, the US-based company developing and managing the platform. An inquiry into the facts of the case was initiated as well,” read the official statement from Italy’s data protection authority.

The move comes days after a group of artificial intelligence experts and industry executives, along with Twitter CEO and OpenAI confounder Elon Musk wrote an open letter to the US Federal Trade Commission calling for a six-month pause in training systems more powerful than OpenAI’s newly launched model GPT-4.

The letter, issued by the non-profit Future of Life Institute and signed by more than 1,000 people including Musk, Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque, researchers at Alphabet-owned DeepMind, as well as AI heavyweights Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell, called for a pause on advanced AI development until shared safety protocols for such designs were developed, implemented and audited by independent experts.

The statement from the Italian authorities said that a data breach affecting ChatGPT users’ conversations and information on payments by subscribers to the service was reported on 20 March.

“In its order, the Italian SA highlights that no information is provided to users and data subjects whose data are collected by Open AI; more importantly, there appears to be no legal basis underpinning the massive collection and processing of personal data to ‘train’ the algorithms on which the platform relies,” the statement added.

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The company has 20 days to provide the agency with the material and possible remedies before a final decision can be made about its future in the country.ChatGPT is already not available in China, North Korea, Russia, and Iran.

According to a NYT report, OpenAI said it had disabled ChatGPT for users in Italy and that it was committed to protecting people’s privacy.

“We actively work to reduce personal data in training our A.I. systems like ChatGPT because we want our A.I. to learn about the world, not about private individuals,” the company said according to the report. “We also believe that A.I. regulation is necessary.”