Pro-Palestinian Hackers Claim Credit for Cyberattack that Took Down ChatGPT

A pro-Palestinian hacker collective known as Anonymous Sudan has claimed responsibility for a cyberattack on OpenAI's ChatGPT that took the popular artificial intelligence chatbot offline on Wednesday.

The group mounted the attack on OpenAI because CEO Sam Altman had traveled to Israel in June and met with Israeli politicians, the hackers said in a message posted to Telegram.

OpenAI admitted it was experiencing "periodic outages" of ChatGPT due to a suspected Denial of Service attack, a maneuver that overwhelms a server with bot traffic.

Anonymous Sudan, which has been linked to the Russian government, has previously aligned itself with Palestinian cause, claiming it had targeted the Israeli military, including the country's Iron Dome anti-rocket system. It has also claimed responsibility for a number of other high-profile hacks, including an August cyberattack on Elon Musk’s X that took down the site formerly known as Twitter for several hours.