Tech advocacy group Public Citizen has demanded OpenAI withdraw its app Sora 2, citing safety concerns and threats to democracy from the AI video generator.

In a letter to the company and CEO Sam Altman, Public Citizen wrote that the app’s hasty release so that it could launch ahead of competitors shows a “consistent and dangerous pattern of OpenAI rushing to market with a product that is either inherently unsafe or lacking in needed guardrails.” Sora 2, the letter says, shows a “reckless disregard” for product safety, as well as people’s rights to their own likeness and the stability of democracy. The group also sent the letter to Congress.

OpenAI didn’t respond to requests for comment.

“Our biggest concern is the potential threat to democracy,” said Public Citizen tech policy advocate J.B. Branch in an interview. “I think we’re entering a world in which people can’t really trust what they see. And we’re starting to see strategies in politics where the first image, the first video that gets released, is what people remember.”

The typical Sora video, made on OpenAI’s app and spread onto TikTok, Instagram, X and Facebook, is designed to be amusing enough for users to click and share. Yet a growing chorus of advocacy groups, academics and researchers is raising alarms about the dangers of letting people create AI videos on just about anything they can type into a prompt, leading to the proliferation of nonconsensual images and realistic deepfakes in a sea of less harmful “AI slop.” OpenAI has cracked down on AI creations of public figures — among them, Michael Jackson, Martin Luther King Jr. and Mister Rogers — doing outlandish things, but only after an outcry from family estates and an actors’ union.

Branch, author of the letter, also sees broader concerns to people’s privacy that disproportionately impact vulnerable populations online.

OpenAI blocks nudity but Branch said that “women are seeing themselves being harassed online” in other ways, such as with fetishized niche content that makes it through the apps’ restrictions. The news outlet 404 Media last week reported on a flood of Sora-made videos of women being strangled.

OpenAI has faced similar complaints about its flagship product, ChatGPT. Seven new lawsuits filed last week in California courts claim the chatbot drove people to suicide and harmful delusions even when they had no prior mental health issues.

Public Citizen was not involved in the lawsuits, but Branch said he sees parallels in Sora’s hasty release.

He said they’re “putting the pedal to the floor without regard for harms. Much of this seems foreseeable. But they’d rather get a product out there, get people downloading it, get people who are addicted to it rather than doing the right thing and stress-testing these things beforehand and worrying about the plight of everyday users.”