LONDON (NEWSnet/AP) — Italian regulators said they told OpenAI that its ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot violated European Union’s data privacy rules.

The country's data protection authority, known as Garante, started investigating ChatGPT last year, when it temporarily banned within Italy the chatbot that can produce text, images and sound in response to users' questions.

The agency said Monday that it notified San Francisco-based OpenAI of breaches of the EU rules, known as General Data Protection Regulation.

Based on the results of its “fact-finding activity," the agency said it “concluded that the available evidence pointed to the existence of breaches of the provisions” in the EU privacy rules.

OpenAI has 30 days to reply to the allegations, and said it would work with Italian regulators.

“We believe our practices align with GDPR and other privacy laws, and we take additional steps to protect people’s data and privacy," a company statement said. "We want our AI to learn about the world, not about private individuals. We actively work to reduce personal data in training our systems like ChatGPT, which also rejects requests for private or sensitive information about people.”

In the meantime, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission opened an inquiry last week into the relationships between AI startups OpenAI and Anthropic and the tech giants that have bankrolled them — Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

Competition regulators in the 27-nation EU and Britain, meanwhile, are also examining Microsoft's OpenAI investments.

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