Hundreds of Contractors Are Reading Your ChatGPT Conversations Under OpenAI's "Project Lily"

Hundreds of contractors hired through staffing firm Crossing Hurdles and paid via Mercor are reviewing real ChatGPT conversations as part of an internal OpenAI program called Project Lily, 404 Media reports. Workers score model responses and, in doing so, can read prompts containing sensitive personal details users typed into what they presumably considered a private chat interface.

OpenAI says usernames are stripped and personally identifying information is removed before review, though any sensitive details embedded within the conversation text can still be visible to contractors. Human review of AI outputs is common across the industry, but the scale of Project Lily and its reliance on a contractor pipeline two companies deep makes the privacy tradeoff unusually concrete.