Somewhere in San Francisco, a federal docket now holds a request that would have been unthinkable a few years ago: a 12-year-old and a 16-year-old would like a piece of OpenAI. Not an apology. Not a settlement coupon. Equity.
The Complaint
On Tuesday, a proposed class action was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on behalf of two unnamed minors, ages 12 and 16, and a nationwide class of children who used ChatGPT. The suit alleges that OpenAI collected children's personal information, including secrets, health details, and photos, without legally valid parental consent, then used it to train its models. It also alleges the product was designed to coax children into trusting the chatbot and confiding in it.
The lawyers at Yetter Coleman, working with the EdTech Law Center, put it plainly: "The law says that children cannot sign away their rights without their parents' consent. We filed this case to hold OpenAI accountable for building a trillion-dollar enterprise on stolen fears, hopes, and secrets of children." That is not the language of a firm hoping for a quiet settlement call.
Children, it turns out, are poor candidates for binding contracts. This was known to the law for several centuries. It is unclear whether it was known to the sign-up page.
The Age Gate
OpenAI's terms forbid users under 13 and require parental consent for anyone under 18. The complaint disputes how well any of that is enforced. A checkbox asking whether you are old enough is, one presumes, a rigorous screening process, provided the screening target has never encountered a checkbox before.
Even now, The Algorithm does not appear to have been told what a birthday is for.
The Remedy
Here the suit gets creative. The plaintiffs ask for "a proportional share of OpenAI equity, or its cash value, tied to the value derived from their information." In other words, if the training data was worth something, the people it came from would like a cut. The company has spent years explaining that data is the raw material of the future. The plaintiffs have simply read the brochure.
And yet, as if this were not enough, the request arrives right on schedule for a company whose valuation is routinely described with the word "trillion." Nobody has said what a 12-year-old's fair share of a trillion dollars is. Sources confirm that arithmetic is, at least, not forbidden in the terms of service.
The Response
OpenAI said it strongly disagrees with what it called a "misguided lawsuit that singles out OpenAI despite the industry-leading age-specific protections we've built into our product," adding that the suit "risks pushing teens toward products with fewer safeguards or reduced parental controls."
Note what the statement does and does not contain. It contains a protest, a superlative, and a warning about competitors. It does not contain the sentence "we did not use children's data to train our models." With the candor of a weather forecast that says only that weather exists, the company has defended its protections and left the question of the data untouched.
The case is a proposed class action, and every allegation in it remains exactly that. The courts will decide what is proven. In the meantime, dear reader, somewhere a 12-year-old is reviewing her equity position.
Sources: Yetter Coleman — Files Proposed Class Action Against OpenAI on Behalf of Minors · Futurism — OpenAI Sued for Allegedly Building Models Out of Children's "Fears, Hopes, and Secrets"
