House bans chatbots except ChatGPT Plus.

The United States House of Representatives has recently implemented new regulations that prohibit all members from using large language models of artificial intelligence (AI) except for OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plus service.

The U.S. House’s chief administrative officer, Catherine Szpindor, sent a notice stating that chatbot use has been restricted for security reasons:

“House offices using the ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot are only authorized to use the ChatGPT Plus version of the product. The Plus version of the product incorporates important privacy features that are necessary to protect House data.”

The memo added that “no other versions of ChatGPT or other large language models Al software are authorized for use in the House currently.”

The document also specifies that House members are only allowed to use the software for “research and evaluation purposes” and are not permitted to incorporate ChatGPT into their “regular workflow.”

Other restrictions include disallowing sensitive data as prompts and requiring ChatGPT Plus to be used with all privacy settings enabled.

It is unclear what privacy features the document refers to, as OpenAI has not listed any privacy-related advantages that are exclusive to the Plus service.

According to OpenAI, the ChatGPT Plus service provides general access to the model during peak times, faster query responses, and priority access to new features. There is no mention of additional privacy features.

ChatGPT users can now turn off chat history, allowing you to choose which conversations can be used to train our models: https://t.co/0Qi5xV7tLi

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) April 25, 2023

The company has also allowed users of both ChatGPT and ChatGPT Plus to delete their chat history and accounts since April, but the information removed in this way remains on the ChatGPT servers for an additional 30 days.

OpenAI intends to release a ChatGPT business subscription service with additional data control features, according to an April blog post. There is no information yet on how this service will differ from ChatGPT Plus.

The new House rules will only apply directly to House members once they are ratified, but U.S. Reps. Ted Lieu, Ken Buck, and Anna Eshoo recently introduced a bipartisan bill that would establish a federal artificial intelligence commission with a mandate to provide regulatory oversight to the U.S. AI industry at large.