Italy's Garante lifts its ChatGPT ban after OpenAI adds privacy safeguards

OpenAI restored ChatGPT access in Italy after adding the privacy controls demanded by the country’s data protection authority, the Garante, which had ordered the service offline the previous month over suspected GDPR violations. The regulator had set a deadline of the end of April for compliance; OpenAI met it with four days to spare.

The changes included a more visible privacy policy on OpenAI’s homepage and at ChatGPT login, a new help-centre article explaining what data the company collects and how it is used for training, and an opt-out form letting users exclude their conversations from future model training. OpenAI also added an EU-specific mechanism for exercising data-protection rights, including requesting deletion or correction of inaccurate personal information the model might generate about someone, and introduced age-gating that required users to confirm they were 18 or older, or 13 with parental consent, at sign-up — with a more robust verification system promised for later. The Garante’s underlying investigation into OpenAI’s historical data-processing practices remained open.

Italy’s action had been the first outright ban of ChatGPT by a Western government, and its resolution established a template — disclosure, an opt-out for training data, and age controls — that other European regulators referred back to in their own scrutiny of the product over the following year.