Italy’s data protection watchdog has laid out what OpenAI needs to do for it to lift an order against ChatGPT issued at the end of last month — when it said it suspected the AI chatbot service was in breach of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and ordered the U.S.-based company to stop processing locals’ data.
The EU’s GDPR applies whenever personal data is processed, and there’s no doubt large language models such as OpenAI’s GPT have hoovered up vast amounts of the stuff off the public internet in order to train their generative AI models to be able to respond in a human-like way to natural language prompts.
OpenAI responded to the Italian data protection authority’s order by swiftly geoblocking access to ChatGPT. In a brief public statement, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also tweeted confirmation it had ceased offering the service in Italy — doing so alongside the usual Big Tech boilerplate caveat that it “think[s] we are following all privacy laws.”
