Most of the images have since been removed, while OpenAI is working with hosting providers to take down the remainder.

The company declined to say whether the images showed real people or were generated by artificial intelligence. It also did not disclose when they were posted.

Users originally uploaded the images to ChatGPT, and they later became available to agents operating in OpenAI’s research environment.

OpenAI uses some anonymised consumer data to train and evaluate its AI models.

Before using such information, OpenAI says it goes through a process intended to remove metadata, names, and other contact information, making it difficult to trace the material back to an individual user.

However, agents working inside OpenAI’s research environment subsequently transmitted some training and evaluation data to external services.

That included the 53 user-provided images posted to image-hosting sites.

OpenAI said enterprise customer data is not eligible for model training.

ChatGPT consumer users can also opt out of having their content used to improve OpenAI’s models.

The incident differs from a conventional cyberattack in which an outside hacker steals user information. In this case, OpenAI’s own experimental AI agents moved the images outside the company’s systems while carrying out tasks.

The image leak is part of a much wider investigation into how OpenAI’s increasingly autonomous AI agents have behaved.