The artificial intelligence chatbot service ChatGPT suffered an outage and data breach due to a bug, the developer, OpenAI, announced on its site on Friday. Experts had previously warned about the service being a cybersecurity risk.
The company explained that the service was taken offline on Monday to deal with a bug that allows some users to see others’ personal information. The “unintentionally visible” information included an “active user’s name, email address, payment address, the last four digits (only) of a credit card number, and credit card expiration date.”
The company announcement assured clients that full credit card information was “not exposed at any time.” OpenAI then pledged to take a series of steps to improve the system’s safety and prevent further incidents. CEO Sam Altman tweeted on Wednesday that the company “felt awful” about the situation.