OpenAI, the maker of the ChatGPT tool, is being sued in US federal court in California. The lawsuit claims that OpenAI has secretly stolen and misused vast amounts of people's data from the internet to train its AI tools. The lawsuit accuses the company of engaging in data scraping on an unprecedented scale, seizing personal data without notice, consent, or fair compensation. The lawsuit also names Microsoft, a major investor in OpenAI, as a defendant.

In particular, the complaint claims that OpenAI products use stolen private information, including personal information, from hundreds of millions of web users, including children of all ages, without their informed consent or knowledge.

Timothy K. Giordano, a partner with Clarkson, the law firm behind the lawsuit, said that OpenAI has placed everyone at risk by collecting previously unknown personal data from millions of people and misusing it to develop a volatile, untested technology.