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.
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