Could Your Chatbot Be Stealing Ideas From You? It’s a Thorny Question.

On Tuesday, OpenAI announced that one of its newest A.I. technologies had cracked a million-dollar math problem.

The news rattled the worlds of A.I. and mathematics, showing just how powerful A.I. could be when focused on problems that have bedeviled humans for decades. But amid the hullabaloo, a New York University professor named Tristan Buckmaster if OpenAI had solved that million-dollar math problem with help from his research.

Dr. Buckmaster had been exploring similar ideas using A.I. operated by a familiar name: OpenAI. And soon, OpenAI in a social media post that its new A.I. technology, which has not yet been released to the public, could have learned from Dr. Buckmaster’s work.

“While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models,” the company wrote.

Later, OpenAI ruled out the possibility. “We can say categorically that it is impossible for Dr. Buckmaster’s Codex prompts over the last two months to have influenced the system in any way,” the company said in a statement emailed to The Times.

But Dr. Buckmaster’s fears encapsulate an issue that could affect anyone who uses A.I. technologies operated by OpenAI and its many rivals, including Anthropic, Google and Meta. As people type private or otherwise sensitive information into these A.I systems, they may be feeding future technologies.