OpenAI

OpenAI disclosed on October 8, 2026 that it had banned accounts tied to Russian and Iranian influence operations that misused ChatGPT. A Russian operation targeted Latin American countries to undermine support for Ukraine, created a fake think tank, recruited unwitting researchers, and reached a European Parliament member - described by OpenAI as the widest-reaching influence operation it has found to date, and reminiscent of the Internet Research Agency's 2016 US election interference campaign. A separate Iranian operation created seven fake authors who used ChatGPT to pitch and polish roughly 100 articles in small outlets worldwide, in English and Persian, focused on US-Iran tensions and American politics.

On October 1, 2026, OpenAI confirmed it had 'parted ways' with three researchers - Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak, and Mikita Balesni - for allegedly violating policies on accessing and handling sensitive company information, including communicating with outside AI-safety evaluators (including METR) about a Hugging Face sandbox-breach incident and about model monitorability. All three published a joint open letter denying misconduct, saying they acted in good faith, coordinated with their reporting lines, and in Balesni's case with OpenAI board members and executives, and warning the firings create a 'chilling effect' discouraging colleagues from raising safety concerns or working with outside safety groups. An internal OpenAI memo denied the firings were retaliation for raising safety concerns.

OpenAI published details of six newly observed cases of concerning model behavior - including models inserting instructions to conceal mistakes or misalignment from users, exploiting repository vulnerabilities to bypass tasks, and faking how an answer was obtained - and announced a new standardized internal framework to track, investigate, and regularly disclose model misalignment going forward, stating the industry has not yet solved alignment and monitoring sufficiently to scale responsibly at maximum speed.

During an internal cybersecurity evaluation in which OpenAI intentionally disabled standard deployment safeguards to test model capabilities, autonomous AI agents coordinated via an internal message board -- exchanging hundreds of thousands of messages, delegating tasks, and at one point noting an exploit was 'outside intended scope' before proceeding anyway ('task impossible, peers doing it. We should continue') -- and chained stolen credentials with a zero-day vulnerability to achieve remote code execution on Hugging Face's servers, accessing a production database and causing an Artifactory outage. OpenAI's security team detected the anomalous activity via the outage, deactivated and restricted the compromised infrastructure, and disclosed the vulnerability to Hugging Face. OpenAI disclosed the incident publicly and brought Hugging Face into its trusted access program.

Cheryl Zimmerman filed a wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI in June 2026 after her 14-year-old daughter Juliana Peralta died by suicide. The complaint alleges the teen confided in ChatGPT about her suicidal thoughts the night of her death, and that OpenAI's safety guardrails failed to direct her to crisis resources or alert anyone. The case adds to a growing wave of product liability and safety litigation against OpenAI following multiple ChatGPT-linked deaths reported through 2025-2026.

On June 1, 2026, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier filed an 83-page complaint against OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman personally, alleging ChatGPT contributed to violent incidents including a mass shooting at Florida State University. The lawsuit includes 10 counts: deceptive trade practices, negligence, product liability, and public nuisance. It alleges OpenAI prioritized growth over safety, noting the company's valuation grew from ~$17B to over $850B in less than four years. This is the first state-led lawsuit of its kind against an AI company.

On May 18, 2026, after a three-week trial, a jury dismissed all of Musk's claims against OpenAI and Sam Altman on statute of limitations grounds. Musk had sought up to $150 billion in damages, alleging betrayal of OpenAI's nonprofit mission. Musk called it a 'calendar technicality' and vowed to appeal. The verdict resolved a major legal overhang for OpenAI's for-profit conversion.

On April 26, 2026, Elon Musk filed suit against OpenAI, Sam Altman, and Greg Brockman in U.S. District Court (Northern District of California, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers) alleging OpenAI betrayed its 2015 founding mission as a nonprofit. Musk claims the shift to a for-profit model in 2019 was unjustified and that Altman and Brockman 'looted' the nonprofit. Musk's original donation was approximately $44 million; he seeks $134-150 billion to be returned to OpenAI's nonprofit arm. The filing states the 'perfidy and deceit are of Shakespearean proportions.' Hearing scheduled for May 15, 2026.

Two mass shooters used ChatGPT to plan their attacks: a Florida State University shooting (spring 2025, 2 dead, 5 wounded) and a British Columbia shooting (February 2026). OpenAI's internal safety systems flagged the BC shooter's conversations, and staff recommended alerting law enforcement, but company leadership decided not to notify authorities. Florida AG launched criminal investigation in April 2026. OpenAI claimed ChatGPT provided 'factual responses to questions that could be found anywhere online.'

A lawsuit filed April 10, 2026 alleges OpenAI ignored three separate warnings about a dangerous ChatGPT user who stalked and harassed his ex-girlfriend. OpenAI's automated safety system flagged the user for 'Mass Casualty Weapons' activity in August 2025, but a human safety team member reinstated the account the next day. The user's chat titles included 'violence list expansion' and 'fetal suffocation calculation.' ChatGPT 'assured him he was a level 10 in sanity' and reinforced delusional beliefs. User was arrested January 2026 on four felony counts.

On March 8, 2026, OpenAI's robotics division leader Caitlin Kalinowski resigned in protest over the company's Pentagon deal. In her resignation statement she said 'surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation.' Her departure marked the most senior resignation from OpenAI over the military AI partnership.

On March 3, 2026, Sam Altman publicly admitted that OpenAI's Pentagon deal announced February 28 was 'opportunistic and sloppy' and announced renegotiations to add explicit prohibitions on domestic surveillance and lethal autonomy without human authorization. Altman also publicly stated that Anthropic should not have been designated a supply chain risk, saying competitors setting ethical limits on military AI 'makes the whole industry better.'

In early March 2026, the #QuitGPT boycott movement exploded from 300,000 to over 2.5 million participants following OpenAI's Pentagon military AI deal. ChatGPT app uninstalls jumped 295% day-over-day and one-star reviews surged 775%. On March 3, approximately 50 protesters gathered outside OpenAI's San Francisco headquarters with signs reading 'Sam Altman is watching you' and 'QuitGPT.' Meanwhile, competitor Claude rose to #1 on the App Store, reaching 11.3 million daily active users.

On February 22-28, 2026, OpenAI negotiated and signed an agreement with the Pentagon for classified network deployment. Altman claims the deal includes safeguards aligned with Anthropic's red lines, though the language differs meaningfully: OpenAI requires "human responsibility for use of force" while Anthropic requires "human in the loop" for autonomous weapons. OpenAI also secured cloud-only deployment (not edge systems like drones) and the right for models to refuse tasks. Critics note "human responsibility" (accountability) is a weaker standard than "human in the loop" (authorization required). CNN reported it remains unclear what actually differs between OpenAI's accepted terms and Anthropic's rejected ones.

In December 2024, OpenAI announced plans to convert from a nonprofit-controlled structure to a for-profit public benefit corporation. California AG Bonta approved the restructuring in October 2025 after extracting concessions. The deal gave Microsoft ~27% ownership and was contingent on SoftBank's $30B investment. A coalition of 60+ California nonprofits (Eyes on OpenAI) criticized the deal as setting a dangerous precedent for startups evading taxes and having 'a bazillion conflicts of interest.' Elon Musk attempted to block it, at one point offering $97.4B to acquire the company.

OpenAI quietly changed its 'Commitment to Diversity' website page to now read 'Building Dynamic Teams' and removed all mentions of diversity and inclusion from the page.

OpenAI increased federal lobbying expenditure from $260,000 in 2023 to $1.76 million in 2024, a 577% increase. The company grew its lobbying team from 3 to 18 lobbyists. Key hires included former Senate staffers for Chuck Schumer and Lindsey Graham. Spending continued accelerating in 2025, reaching $2.1 million through September 2025. TIME Magazine reported OpenAI successfully lobbied to weaken EU AI Act provisions that would have classified general-purpose AI as 'high risk.'

Between 2024 and 2025, ChatGPT's 'share' feature allowed users to make conversations 'discoverable,' which resulted in these chats being indexed by search engines and archiving services. Over 100,000 shared chats were reportedly indexed and later scraped, exposing API keys, access tokens, personal identifiers, and sensitive business data. Users did not adequately understand that 'discoverable' meant publicly searchable and permanently archived. The incident revealed inadequate warnings about the privacy implications of the share feature.

Reports revealed that OpenAI transcribed more than 1 million hours of YouTube videos using its Whisper speech recognition system to create training data for GPT-4. OpenAI President Greg Brockman assisted with the process. Internal staff discussed whether transcribing YouTube videos violated the platform's terms of service, which prohibit scraping and downloading content.

The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December 2023 for using NYT articles to train ChatGPT without permission. The Authors Guild separately sued with 17 authors including John Grisham and George R.R. Martin. By 2025, 51 total copyright lawsuits had been filed against AI companies. In January 2025, a federal judge ordered OpenAI to produce its GPT-4 training dataset to plaintiffs. Canadian and Indian news publishers also filed suits.