OpenAI's ChatGPT breaches privacy rules: Italy

Milan (Italy): OpenAI's artificial intelligence chatbot application ChatGPT breached data protection rules, said Italy's data protection authority on Monday, pressing ahead with an investigation started last year.

The Italian data protection authority, known as Garante, is one of the European Union's most proactive in assessing AI platform compliance with the bloc's data privacy regime. Last year, it banned ChatGPT over alleged breaches of European Union (EU) privacy rules.

The service was reactivated after OpenAI addressed issues concerning, amongst other things, the right of users to decline to consent to the use of personal data to train algorithms. At the time, the regulator said it would continue its investigations. It has since concluded that elements indicate one or more potential data privacy violations, it said in a statement without providing further detail.

In an e-mailed statement OpenAI said it believed its practices were aligned with EU's privacy laws. "We actively work to reduce personal data in training our systems like ChatGPT," it said, adding it "plans to continue to work constructively with the Garante". The Garante on Monday said Microsoft-backed OpenAI has 30 days to present defence arguments, adding that its investigation would take into account work done by a European task force comprising national privacy watchdogs.

Italy was the first West European country to curb ChatGPT, whose rapid development has attracted attention from lawmakers and regulators. Under the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) introduced in 2018, any company found to have broken rules faced fines of up to 4 per cent of its global turnover.

In December, EU lawmakers and governments agreed with provisional terms for regulating AI systems such as ChatGPT, moving a step closer to setting rules to govern the technology.