London CNN —Regulators in Italy issued a temporary ban on ChatGPT Friday, effective immediately, due to privacy concerns and said they had opened an investigation into how OpenAI, the US company behind the popular chatbot, uses data. Italy’s data protection agency said users lacked information about the collection of their data and that a breach at ChatGPT had been reported on March 20. The Italian regulator also expressed concerns over the lack of age verification for ChatGPT users. In the meantime, EU companies must comply with the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, as well as the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act, which apply to tech platforms. Earlier this month, OpenAI released GPT-4, a new version of the technology underpinning ChatGPT that is even more powerful.

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