NYU researcher accuses OpenAI of 'surveillance plagiarism' by training on user chat sessions

Shoddy-Childhood-511 · reddit · 2026-09-10

A Reddit post recounts NYU researcher Tristan Buckmaster's public statement accusing OpenAI and Sebastian Bubeck of misconduct, including threats and pressuring him to drop an Anthropic coauthor from a paper.

The key community-relevant point, clarified by Talia Ringer: OpenAI trains on your uploaded data and chat sessions by default unless you opt out. The author frames this as "surveillance plagiarism" — internal models can exploit humans' past prompting work to appear more autonomous and capable.

The post recommends locally-run open-weight models whenever data privacy or being first matters.

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