There is a profound irony at the heart of OpenAI’s current legal position. And it deserves more attention than it is getting.

On one side, OpenAI and its peers are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on consumer advertising campaigns designed to make artificial intelligence feel safe, human and trustworthy. Anthropic alone spent approximately $16.5 million on U.S. television advertising in 2025. The broader AI brand war playing out at Cannes Lions and across the global marketing industry is fundamentally about one thing: convincing people that these companies can be trusted with their data, their decisions and their daily lives.

On the other side, OpenAI is arguing in a California federal court that a user who entered sensitive health and financial queries into ChatGPT, and whose data was allegedly shared with Meta and Google without her knowledge, consented to that sharing simply by accepting the platform’s privacy policy when creating an account.

“By inputting prompts into the ChatGPT chat box and/or creating a ChatGPT account, plaintiff was on notice of OpenAI’s terms and privacy policy and consented that information about her use of ChatGPT, including her query topics, would be disclosed to third parties,” the company argued in a motion filed this week before U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Huff in the Southern District of California.

The plaintiff, California resident Amargo Couture, filed a class-action lawsuit in May 2026, alleging that ChatGPT transmitted data relating to her sensitive health and financial queries to Meta and Google through embedded tracking tools, specifically Meta Pixel and Google Analytics. The suit accuses OpenAI of violating federal and California wiretap laws and committing intrusion upon seclusion. OpenAI is seeking dismissal of the case at a hearing scheduled for 5 October.

The legal argument itself is familiar. The defence that users consent by accepting a platform’s terms and conditions has been successfully deployed by technology companies for years. Courts have often sided with platforms on this issue. OpenAI may ultimately prevail in this case.

But winning in court and winning consumer trust are two different battles fought on entirely different fronts. The gap between OpenAI’s advertising narrative, one built on warmth, reassurance and trust, and its legal argument that users consented by accepting terms they likely never read, is the kind of contradiction that becomes difficult to ignore once exposed.

For Nigerian marketing and brand professionals, the lawsuit offers a valuable lesson in brand management. It demonstrates what happens when a company’s commercial narrative and operational reality diverge in public. The AI industry is racing to build consumer trust. Every privacy lawsuit, every data-sharing allegation and every “you consented” legal defence represents a withdrawal from the same trust account these companies are trying to build through increasingly expensive advertising campaigns.

The Pew Research finding that only 10 per cent of U.S. adults say their excitement about AI outweighs their concerns is more than a consumer sentiment statistic. It reflects the cumulative impact of exactly this kind of disconnect: companies projecting one message in their advertising while defending a different position in court.

The most powerful brand promise is one an organisation can consistently keep. OpenAI is learning, in full public view, what happens when that promise comes under scrutiny.

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