A newly filed class-action lawsuit claims that OpenAI LP collected personal information belonging to millions of people without their permission.

The complaint, which was submitted on Wednesday to a San Francisco federal court, also names Microsoft Corp. as a defendant. Microsoft has reportedly invested $13 billion in OpenAI over the past few years and closely collaborates with the startup on product development initiatives. The suit was brought by California-based Clarkson Law Firm on behalf of 16 individuals who believe their personal misinformation was misused.

OpenAI is accused of scraping about 300 billion words’ worth of articles, books and other content from the web to train its language models. That data, the suit charges, included millions of Americans’ personal information. OpenAI allegedly hoovered up names, login credentials, payment details, medical information and other sensitive records.

“Despite established protocols for the purchase and use of personal information, Defendants took a different approach: theft,” the lawsuit reads. “OpenAI did so in secret, and without registering as a data broker as it was required to do under applicable law.”

The lawsuit claims the artificial intelligence startup misused personal information in other ways as well. OpenAI is accused of unlawfully collecting data belonging to users of its ChatGPT chatbot service. Additionally, the plaintiffs charge that OpenAI accessed personal user information via third-party services such as Snapchat and Stripe that integrate with ChatGPT.

OpenAI’s data collection practices, the lawsuit argues, violate multiple laws. The startup is accused of breaching several state privacy regulations, the federal Electronic Privacy Communications Act and certain other laws.

The plaintiffs are seeking $3 billion in damages from OpenAI. According to The Register, that figure may be a placeholder sum because damages are usually determined if and after a case is decided in favor of the plaintiffs.

The lawsuit is seeking other remedies as well. The plaintiffs are asking for a ruling that would prohibit OpenAI from commercially offering or developing ChatGPT until it implements more AI safeguards. Additionally, the suit argues that the startup should create an independent “AI council” to oversee how its technology is used.

“Each new user and dollar earned represents another victim financially damaged by the ongoing commercial misappropriation of their personal information,” the Clarkson Law Firm wrote in a blog post.

The lawsuit is the latest in a series of class-action complaints brought recently against the developers of generative AI products.

In January, a group of artists sued three generative AI providers over alleged copyright violations. Two months earlier, a law firm filed a class-action complaint against Microsoft over its GitHub unit’s Copilot code generation tool. The suit charges that GitHub trained Copilot on open-source software projects in a way that breached those projects’ code licensing terms.

Image: OpenAI