OpenAI's Luxury Influencer Retreat Triggers Backlash Over Environmental Impact and AI Ethics

Influencers draw backlash for attending OpenAI's first luxury trip

OpenAI's first-ever influencer brand trip is sparking online backlash as tensions over the use of AI continue. Over the weekend, OpenAI took what appears to be a handful of influencers to a luxury retreat in upstate New York for what was called "Summer Club." There, the creators were treated to farm-to-table dinners, wellness activities like beekeeping, and classes on how to better use OpenAI products. One creator posted about making a website, while another took a photo of a brochure that said "painting workshop" on it. The videos were aesthetic and lighthearted, but many of the comments were not. One influencer, for example, who posted about going on the trip on her TikTok and Instagram had comments from people insinuating she sold her soul "for a nice hotel room," or asking if she could do a video reconciling her trip with AI data centers' environment impact. Another influencer who posted about the trip was asked if she was going to do a get-ready-with-me (the popular video format where influencers record their process of getting ready) about touring a data center. When TechCrunch reached out to a third influencer about her time on the trip, she appeared to have deleted the video she made about her time there, although she retained others that don't explicitly reference that they were part of the OpenAI brand trip. It's not surprising that OpenAI is enlisting influencers by offering luxury brand trips. In February, Vanity Fair reported that the company hired "celebrity whisperer" Charles Porch as its first VP of global creative partnerships. Porch was coming from Instagram, where he was VP of global partnerships. In announcing the hire, Porch said that his job was going to be talking to creative communities "to figure out how we build the best products to serve them," and he planned to do a "listening tour" to learn more about the relationship people have with AI tools. It's important to note that OpenAI is not the only AI lab that has worked with influencers. Anthropic reportedly hosted an influencer brand dinner for Claude, and back in February, Microsoft Copilot hosted an influencer brand trip to the Super Bowl, the tech newsletter Sarah and Kate reported. None of those other AI trips seem to have struck as big of a nerve as this OpenAI brand trip. One influencer took to LinkedIn to write that she thought people "would be interested in the behind-the-scenes tips and tricks" of using OpenAI technology, but didn't realize how many people were anti-AI. "I didn't for one second consider it would be controversial," she wrote. TechCrunch spoke to a person who left a negative comment on a video posted by an influencer attending the OpenAI Summer Camp. The commenter pointed out that many Americans have a negative view of AI and that there needs to be a conversation about how to use the technology more responsibly. "These posh influencers events are, again, giving people ammunition to have negative opinions," she told TechCrunch. "The world is on fire. It's not a great time ot brag about your $5,000-a-night suite." There is also more to the timing of the trip that struck people. OpenAI is set to strike a $500 billion deal to build a data center in Ohio, during a time when the socio-ecological impact of AI data centers has taken center stage. The irony was not lost on some commenters that OpenAI held a brand retreat in a luxury resort nestled in nature. Other commenters also noted OpenAI's $200 million contract with the Department of Defense as a reason the brand trip evoked ire. TechCrunch has reached out to influencers for comment. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

OpenAI's influencer retreat backfired into a greenwashing row

OpenAI flew a group of influencers to a $2,000-a-night wellness resort to warm up the public mood around AI. Days before a reported $500bn data-centre deal, the internet called it greenwashing, and the creators got the backlash. OpenAI has an image problem, and it just spent a weekend making it worse. The company flew a group of influencers to a luxury resort to soften how the public sees AI. The internet took one look and called it greenwashing. The event, branded "Summer Camp," ran at Wildflower Farms, a resort in New York's Hudson Valley where rooms can top $2,000 a night, Business Insider reported. Creators posted farm-to-table dinners under bistro lights, a beekeeping session, and classes on OpenAI's tools. They went home with branded canvas bags and jars of honey. The videos were soft-focus and lighthearted. The comments were not. Across TikTok, Reddit, X and Instagram, people called the trip "dystopian" and accused OpenAI of greenwashing. One commenter told TechCrunch the issue was timing: "The world is on fire. It's not a great time to brag about your $5,000-a-night suite." The irony writes itself The charge is not abstract. OpenAI is building data centres across the US at speed, and those sites are hungry for energy and water. The company is reported to be close to a $500bn deal for a data centre in Ohio. Hosting a nature retreat, bees included, in the middle of that was never going to read as innocent. It also landed in a public already wary of AI. Worry about power bills, water and job losses has hardened into open hostility online. The creators became the nearest target. Taylor Lorenz said the internet was "cancelling" attendees. Some doubled down; one insisted her "morals were not compromised." Another relabelled the trip as time with "a tech company," then deleted the OpenAI video. Everyone does it. OpenAI got caught. Influencer trips are standard, and OpenAI is not the only lab running them. Rival Anthropic reportedly hosted a low-key creator dinner for Claude, and Microsoft took influencers to the Super Bowl. Neither drew this. The difference, one startup noted, was visibility. Anthropic kept its version subtle. OpenAI staged the whole thing in the open, logo glowing at the end of the table. None of it was accidental. OpenAI hired Instagram's former partnerships chief, its "celebrity whisperer," as its first head of creative partnerships this year. Summer Camp, it says, was education-led, timed to the launch of ChatGPT Work, and meant to show people practical uses of its tools. "Creators are an important part of our community," a spokesperson said, adding that the company welcomes "healthy debate." The debate is the part OpenAI seems to have misjudged. It would not say whether the creators were paid, or expected to post. What the weekend bought was a fresh wave of the exact sentiment it set out to cool. The image problem was the reason for the trip. The trip became the image problem.

OpenAI's first luxury influencer trip draws online backlash

OpenAI's first brand trip came with private cabins, monogrammed pajamas, gourmet outdoor dinners, and jars of honey stamped with the company's logo. Online, the luxury getaway became a much less relaxing conversation about AI. Over the weekend, the company flew a group of creators to Wildflower Farms, a luxury resort in New York's Hudson Valley that bills itself as a "meaningful encounter with nature." The creators posted luxurious room tours -- rates run roughly $1,500 to $3,100 per night -- exploring the picturesque grounds, chatted with fellow content creators and OpenAI execs, and shared awe-struck clips with their tens to hundreds of thousands of followers. "I'm still processing how insanely EPIC the last 72 hours has been," AI creator Justyn Warner wrote on Instagram. Warner said OpenAI flew him to New York for its "first ever brand trip," where he was surrounded by "some of the best creators on the planet and some of the brightest minds in AI." The guest list leaned heavily toward people whose content already overlaps with technology, work, and entrepreneurship. Attendees included tech and career creator Megan Lieu; career and business creators Grace McCarrick and Avni Barman; software and fashion creator Sreya Halder (who has partnered with OpenAI before), among many other recognizable faces in the tech sphere. For some social media users, the combination of artificial intelligence and a luxury wilderness retreat landed strangely. As posts from the weekend spread, attendees' comment sections filled with questions about the environmental cost of AI, its effect on creative work, and why creators had agreed to help promote it in the first place. AI summer camp meets AI's environmental footprint OpenAI could hardly have chosen a more on-the-nose setting for the weekend. Wildflower Farms sits on 140 acres in Gardiner, New York, surrounded by meadows, woodlands, orchards, and views of the Shawangunk Ridge. The resort, as glamorous and serene as it is, is an awkward backdrop for a company facing mounting questions about the physical infrastructure supporting its products. AI may feel like something that lives entirely on a screen, but every ChatGPT request must be processed by servers in data centers, many of which are equipped with specialized computer chips. Those chips draw electricity and generate considerable heat. Keeping them from overheating requires additional electricity and, at many facilities, large amounts of water. The International Energy Agency projects that global data-center electricity consumption will more than double between 2024 and 2030, with servers primarily used for AI driving nearly half of that growth. In the United States, data centers directly consumed an estimated 17 billion gallons of water in 2023. "The concept of attending an AI brand trip surrounded by nature while it actively hurts the environment is an incredible bit," one X user wrote in response to a now-deleted post by tech influencer @meshtimes. In the r/NYCinfluencersnark Reddit thread about the brand trip, another commenter asked whether business influencer Nat Lucy was "gazing at where the new data center is gonna go," in her post. "Did they promise you fresh water when we run out?" another commenter wrote. Communities are increasingly pushing back. At least 75 proposed data centers worth approximately $130 billion were delayed or blocked during the first three months of 2026, while a June report identified 430 local Facebook groups with more than 525,000 combined members opposing the projects. OpenAI's latest proposal appears designed to get ahead of those concerns. On July 22, it announced Project Camellia, a data-center campus planned for rural Georgia. OpenAI promised the facility would use "minimal" water and would not increase residents' electricity bills. "We believe showing up early is the right way to build trust," the company said, while acknowledging that significant details about the project remain unresolved. That emphasis on trust helps explain the value of bringing creators into the room. As psychologist and researcher Dr. Anna Kallschmidt said in a video regarding OpenAI's latest "unsurprising" brand trip, "Without trust, you have nothing. That is why these companies...are bringing these people in because they know people don't trust them, and they're hoping by bringing in faces that you trust, that trust will build onto [OpenAI]." Kallschmidt added she receives an email "every other day" from an AI company interested in a brand deal, suggesting that OpenAI is part of a larger effort to find recognizable people who can make AI products feel more accessible. That was precisely what bothered some people online: they saw OpenAI borrowing credibility that creators had already established with their audiences. One Reddit commenter warned about "AI companies utilizing influencers who are more than willing to be talking heads for a company's narrative that they probably know so little about." Another added, "Not all money is good money." Creators are defending themselves Once the backlash reached attendees' comment sections, some began explaining why they had accepted OpenAI's invitation. Career and business creator Grace McCarrick responded directly to people questioning her decision to attend: "If I have the opportunity to be in the room and hear from people who are at the helm of change, I can do that," McCarrick said in one TikTok response. "It's actually well within my moral system." McCarrick also called the backlash "shocking AI psychosis" in a longer LinkedIn post, and said she had no idea so many people felt this strongly about the technology. "It didn't for one second occur to me that it could be controversial," McCarrick wrote. The backlash also caught the attention of tech journalist Taylor Lorenz. "Influencers are getting cancelled for going on the OpenAI brand summer camp weekend trip, which is very interesting bc I have not seen similar criticism towards influencers who have been attending Anthropic events," she wrote on X. In a follow-up, Lorenz noted that McCarrick already publicizes consulting work for Amazon, Uber, and DoorDash. Why, she seemed to ask, had this OpenAI retreat suddenly become the partnership that crossed the line? OpenAI is investing in influence This brand trip did not appear out of nowhere. In February, OpenAI hired Charles Porch, Instagram's longtime vice president of global partnerships, for the newly created position of vice president of global creative partnerships. Porch spent more than 15 years at Instagram, Facebook, and Meta cultivating relationships with the kinds of people who can introduce a new platform or product to a much larger audience. His résumé includes helping Beyoncé release her self-titled album exclusively on Instagram in 2013, convincing Pope Francis to join the platform, organizing activations at the Met Gala and Vanity Fair's Oscar Party, and overseeing a program that offered bonuses to creators who began posting on Instagram Reels. That experience matters to OpenAI. Porch spent years convincing influential people to join a new platform and then turning their participation into moments that attracted everyone else. Now, he is applying that playbook to ChatGPT. "I'm going to be the person that's talking to creative communities around the world to figure out how we build the best products to serve them," Porch told Vanity Fair when his hiring was announced. Porch is only one piece of that effort. On April 2, OpenAI acquired TBPN, a daily technology talk show hosted by Jordi Hays and John Coogan, in a deal worth somewhere in the "low hundreds of millions of dollars." Often described as "SportsCenter for Silicon Valley," TBPN streams for three hours every weekday, mixing friendly executive interviews, industry gossip, and enthusiastic celebrations of new products and funding rounds. Its audience is relatively small but influential, including founders, investors, and technology executives. Guests have included Mark Zuckerberg, Satya Nadella, Mark Cuban, and Altman, who has called it his "favorite tech show." University of Washington professor Margaret O'Mara told NPR that the purchase appeared partly intended to influence how people in the industry talk about OpenAI. In the same report, tech scholar Sara Watson described the company as facing a larger "narrative change problem" as the public grows more skeptical of the industry's promises. The Wildflower Farms retreat brought that effort outside the Silicon Valley bubble. OpenAI is clearly aiming to surround its products with people who already know how to attract attention, explain new technology, and build loyal audiences. The trip definitely succeeded in getting people to talk about OpenAI, though the company may have preferred a different conversation.

OpenAI influencer brand trip sparks backlash over AI ethics

OpenAI hosted a group of influencers at a luxury resort in upstate New York over the weekend for what the company called "Summer Club," a two-day retreat that has since drawn criticism across social media platforms. According to TechCrunch, the event included farm-to-table dinners, wellness activities such as beekeeping, and painting workshops, alongside classes on OpenAI products including ChatGPT Work. The retreat was held at Wildflower Farms, according to NBC News. Influencers who posted videos from the event faced pointed criticism in the comments. One creator was asked to reconcile her attendance with the environmental impact of AI data centers. Another was sarcastically invited to do a get-ready-with-me video touring a data center. A third influencer appeared to delete the video she posted about the trip, though she kept other content that did not reference the OpenAI event. One person who left a negative comment on an influencer's post said that the event gave critics ammunition. "The world is on fire. It's not a great time to brag about your $5,000-a-night suite," she said. The backlash was compounded by timing. OpenAI is preparing to finalize a $500 billion deal to build a data center in Ohio, and the company holds a $200 million contract with the Department of Defense -- both of which drew mention in critical comments on influencer posts. On LinkedIn, one influencer said she had expected curiosity rather than outrage, writing that she was caught completely off guard by the reaction: "I didn't for one second consider it would be controversial," according to TechCrunch. OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri said the event was education-led and aimed at giving creators direct experience with its tools so they could demonstrate them to their audiences. "Creators are an important part of our community and how people get information and learn about our products today," Pusateri said. "We welcome healthy debate as AI becomes more prevalent, and we value creators who choose to engage with us, attend our events, ask tough questions, and learn alongside everyone else." The brand trip is part of a broader marketing push. Charles Porch, who previously led global partnerships at Instagram, joined OpenAI as its first VP of global creative partnerships. OpenAI is not alone among AI companies in courting influencers -- Anthropic held a brand dinner for Claude, and Microsoft $MSFT Copilot hosted influencers at the Super Bowl in February. The expansion of OpenAI's marketing efforts coincides with the company's push into advertising. OpenAI opened its self-serve Ads Manager to all U.S. businesses after eliminating a $50,000 entry barrier that had restricted the platform to larger spenders since its launch earlier this year.

OpenAI Just Took A Bunch Of Influencers On A ChatGPT Brand Trip - And The Internet Has Thoughts

Fast forward three years, and ChatGPT has brought influencers together for an idyllic "Summer Camp" reportedly held in upstate New York. The event was said to be designed to give creators hands-on experience with the recently launched ChatGPT Work tools, with the aim of helping them better understand practical, everyday uses for the platform before sharing those experiences with their audiences. However, people were left scratching their heads. And if you're wondering why, a big part of the conversation comes down to the growing environmental concerns surrounding AI. AI systems rely on vast data centres that require significant amounts of energy, water, and raw materials to build and operate. The electronic waste produced by these systems can contain hazardous substances including mercury and lead. Once operational, these large-scale AI infrastructure data centres require huge amounts of electricity and water-intensive cooling systems to keep them running. "There is still much we don't know about the environmental impact of AI, but some of the data we do have is concerning. We need to make sure the net effect of AI on the planet is positive before we deploy the technology at scale," Golestan (Sally) Radwan, the Chief Digital Officer of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), shared.