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Scarlett Johansson Alleges OpenAI's Sky Imitates Her Voice Without Licensing

14 news reports Snapshot 7 Sep 2026

In brief

An AI system built by Sam Altman and Openai and deployed by Sky Voice Assistant, Sam Altman and 1 other allegedly harmed Scarlett Johansson.

Risk domain
Privacy & Security Compromise of privacy by obtaining, leaking or correctly inferring sensitive information
Occurred
Coverage
14 reportsMay 2024

What happened

OpenAI unveiled a voice assistant with a voice resembling Scarlett Johansson's, despite her refusal to license her voice. Johansson claimed the assistant, "Sky," sounded "eerily similar" to her voice, leading her to seek legal action. OpenAI suspended Sky, asserting the voice was from a different actress.

Laws that address this harm

Policy angle: Classified under Privacy & Security (Compromise of privacy by obtaining, leaking or correctly inferring sensitive information) in the MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy; 5 recorded instruments address this use case.

Matched from the record's risk domain and country to the instruments recorded here. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).

News reports (14)

Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.

  1. Scarlett Johansson Said No, but OpenAI’s Virtual Assistant Sounds Just Like Her
    nytimes.com · Tripp Mickle
  2. Scarlett Johansson’s Statement About Her Interactions With Sam Altman
    nytimes.com · Scarlett Johansson, The New York Times
  3. Scarlett Johansson says OpenAI copied ‘Her’ voice after she said no
    washingtonpost.com · Nitasha Tiku, Pranshu Verma, Gerrit De Vynck
  4. Scarlett Johansson Rebukes OpenAI Over ‘Eerily Similar’ ChatGPT Voice
    wsj.com · Joseph Pisani, Victoria Albert
  5. Scarlett Johansson lawyers up over ChatGPT voice that ‘shocked and angered’ her
    cnn.com · Brian Fung, Clare Duffy, Ramishah Maruf
  6. Scarlett Johansson says she is 'shocked, angered' over new ChatGPT voice
    npr.org · Bobby Allyn
  7. Scarlett Johansson Says She Was ‘Shocked, Angered and in Disbelief’ After Hearing ChatGPT Voice That Sounds Like Her — Read Statement
    tvline.com · Nick Caruso
  8. Exactly how stupid was what OpenAI did to Scarlett Johansson?
    washingtonpost.com · Shira Ovide
  9. The Scarlett Johansson-OpenAI dispute is straight out of ‘Her’
    washingtonpost.com · Sonia Rao
  10. OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show
    washingtonpost.com · Nitasha Tiku
  11. ScarJo-OpenAI fight focuses the AI safety debate
    semafor.com · Reed Albergotti
  12. Behind the Scenes of Scarlett Johansson’s Battle With OpenAI
    wsj.com · Sarah Krouse, Deepa Seetharaman, Joe Flint
  13. Sky voice actor says nobody ever compared her to ScarJo before OpenAI drama
    arstechnica.com · Ashley Belanger
  14. Scarlett Johansson’s OpenAI clash is just the start of legal wrangles over artificial intelligence
    theguardian.com · Dan Milmo

Who was involved

Alleged developer
Sam Altman, Openai
Alleged harmed party
Scarlett Johansson

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

Causal entity
Human
Intent
Intentional
Timing
Post-deployment
Harm level
—
Sectors
—
Countries
—

Risk entries describing this failure mode

Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 2.1.

  • Risks to privacy

    "General- purpose AI models or systems can ‘leak’ information about individuals whose data was used in training. For future models trained on sensitive personal data like health or financial data, this may lead to partic...

    International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI (Bengio2024)

  • Risks to privacy

    "General- purpose AI systems can cause or contribute to violations of user privacy. Violations can occur inadvertently during the training or usage of AI systems, for example through unauthorised processing of personal d...

    International AI Safety Report 2025 (Bengio2025)

  • Private Training Data

    "As recent LLMs continue to incorporate licensed, created, and publicly available data sources in their corpora, the potential to mix private data in the training corpora is significantly increased. The misused private d...

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Association in LLMs

    "Association in LLMs refers to the capability to associate various pieces of information related to a person. According to [68], [86], given a pair of PII entities (xi , xj ), which is associated by a model F. Using a pr...

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Privacy Leakage

    "Privacy Leakage means the generated content includes sensitive personal information"

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Memorization in LLMs

    "Memorization in LLMs refers to the capability to recover the training data with contextual prefixes. According to [88]–[90], given a PII entity x, which is memorized by a model F. Using a prompt p could force the model...

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Privacy Leakage

    "The model is trained with personal data in the corpus and unintentionally exposing them during the conversation."

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Privacy and regulation violations

    "Some of the broken systems discussed above are also very invasive of people’s privacy, controlling, for instance, the length of someone’s last romantic relationship [51]. More recently, ChatGPT was banned in Italy over...

    Navigating the Landscape of AI Ethics and Responsibility (Cunha2023)

Incidents in the same risk subdomain

All incidents in this subdomain

Source record: incident #688 on the AI Incident Database · all 14 reports