Italy Becomes First Western Nation To Block OpenAI’s Popular ChatGPT Chatbot

Residents in Italy will no longer have access to OpenAI’s ChatGPT with immediate effect—as the country’s data protection watchdog has banned the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot citing an alleged privacy breach.

According to the Italian National Authority for Personal Data Protection, ChatGPT may have “suffered a data breach on March 20 concerning users’ conversations and payment information of subscribers to the paid service.”

As such, the nation has become the first western country to halt the use of the chatbot, which it described as a “temporary limitation of the processing of Italian users’ data.” In addition, the officials chided the company for not informing users of the information being collected by the tool.

The watchdog said OpenAI had a “lack of legal basis justifying the collection and mass storage of personal data with the aim of ‘training’ the algorithms that run the platform,” and took issue that although the chatbot is intended only for users 13 years old or older, no age verification is present.

Going forward, the firm has 20 days to respond to the authorities’ concerns or face a potential fine of €20 million (US$21.7 million) or up to 4% of annual revenues. As per the BBC, Ireland is keeping a close eye on the proceedings that could affect more EU countries over time.

OpenAI told the publication it disabled ChatGPT for users in Italy at the government’s request, though it emphasized that it was “committed to protecting people’s privacy” and that it had already reduced the use of personal data in training its systems.

Will the chatbot be welcomed back in Italy soon? Or will other countries across the wider continent and the world clamp down on increasingly popular AI systems? If an open letter backed by Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak is any clue, the technology may come under more scrutiny.

[via Euronews and BBC, cover image via Rokas Tenys | Dreamstime.com]