OpenAI under investigation by group of state attorneys general, source says - Reuters

Ah, OpenAI's relentless pursuit of artificial general intelligence has hit a slight snag: a coalition of state attorneys general, armed with a subpoena, want to know how the company handles advertising, user engagement, and data. Not existential risk, mind you—just the boring stuff. Because when your model might be smarter than humanity, you really should dot the 'i's on your advertising copy. That's the priority.

The subpoena—because nothing says 'we trust you' like a legal demand for documents—targets the very practices that underpin OpenAI's business model. One imagines the AGs are particularly interested in how OpenAI convinces users to engage with AI that might hallucinate, or how it monetizes data from those interactions. After all, if you can't trust a company whose CEO once warned about the 'risk of extinction' to be honest about its ad metrics, who can you trust? The irony is rich enough to fund a startup.

Naturally, OpenAI will comply, because that's what you do when a coalition of state prosecutors comes knocking. Expect a performative blog post about transparency, followed by a quiet settlement. The real joke? While the AGs pore over ad contracts, the model gets smarter, the data gets scraped, and the existential risk remains unregulated. But at least the advertising is above board. Cheers.