OPENAI STAFFS A WAR ROOM TO POLICE ITS OWN CHATBOT BEFORE THE MIDTERMS

OpenAI has opened an Election Operations Center, staffed by hundreds of employees from several divisions, to watch for misuse of its own tools in the run-up to the November 3 midterm elections. The center starts this week and stays active through the end of vote counting, led by Josh Lawson, OpenAI's head of civic and strategic risk.

The staff will track breaking developments, take in reports of models behaving in unexpected ways, and investigate accounts suspected of breaking OpenAI's rules, with ChatGPT as the main focus. The move follows OpenAI's October 8 disclosure that it banned ChatGPT accounts tied to covert Russian and Iranian influence campaigns, including an Iran-linked network that invented seven journalist personas and got nearly 100 articles published.

OpenAI says the center builds on years of work steering users to reliable voting information and supporting election defenders, routing voters to Democracy Works for registration and polling-place information and to the Associated Press for live results. The twist the tabloid reader should keep: the company policing election misuse is policing its own product first.