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The Italian government’s privacy watchdog said Friday that it is temporarily blocking the artificial intelligence software ChatGPT in the wake of a data breach.
In a statement on its website, the Italian Data Protection Authority described its action as provisional “until ChatGPT respects privacy.” The watchdog’s measure involves temporarily limiting the company from holding Italian users‘ data.
U.S.-based OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT, didn’t immediately return a request for comment Friday.
While some public schools and universities around the world have blocked the ChatGPT website from their local networks over student plagiarism concerns, it’s not clear how Italy would block it at a nationwide level.
The move also is unlikely to affect applications from companies that already have licenses with OpenAI to use the same technology driving the chatbot, such as Microsoft’s Bing search engine.
The AI systems that power such chatbots, known as large language models, are able to mimic human writing styles based on the huge trove of digital books and online writings they have ingested.
