ChatGPT Teams Lacks Controls to Prevent Unauthorized Invitations and Potential Cost Implications for Businesses

I’ve observed a significant oversight in ChatGPT Teams being dismissed for various reasons but the most galling, as being too specific to warrant concern. In my 350-staff organisation, we found that any invited member could unauthorisedly invite others to the workspace, incurring immediate, non-refundable costs for the organisation. This lack of control over billing responsibilities and member invitations presents a fundamental flaw, rendering the product unsuitable for business use. We wouldn’t be able to use ChatGPT+ due to inadequate data control, privacy, and GDPR compliance.

The solution—introducing a toggle for controlling member invitations—seems straightforward, yet its absence is a considerable barrier to adoption. This issue’s dismissal overlooks potential significant revenue losses for OpenAI, considering the reluctance of organisations, including mine and others representing tens of thousands of potential users, to proceed with implementation due to this oversight. Highlighting this concern is crucial for it to be adequately addressed, considering its considerable impact on organisational adoption and potential revenue.

I just wanted to make this topic a live one as I know there are many people having the same issue.

Just to stress the issue that this isn’t a small use case: Reddit - Dive into anything

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I would like to emphasize RexPearson’s post as this is an exact issue that our team is having. While not as large as RexPearson’s team, we had an instance of this happening that raised a great concern.

A team member sent an invitation to someone not set up with a license seat. The system sent the invitation, and when accepted, the seat count was updated and our team was charged without any knowledge.

This is a small inconvenience as the invitation was sent to someone that is part of our department but if it were sent to the wrong individual or a large number of individuals, that could be quite disasterous to our budget.

I think this feature to enable/disable member invitation priviledges is a great idea.

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It’s not doubt a HUGE fundamental issue with the system and a relatively easy one to fix. I hope that if enough people raise it with the developers it will hopefully speed up the process of implementing it.

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This is also a HUGE problem for us. We did plan on rolling this out very soon, but our initial testing has discovered this massive flaw.

Members need to be restricted from inviting other users and prevent incurring unauthorised billing costs.

How can it be right that a team member be able to conduct a financial transaction on the Team owners registered credit card without any knowledge or approval from the Team owner?

This makes ChatGPT Team Plan totally unviable until this is fixed.

There seems to a be a few posts on the forums about this, but many have been closed, citing it was designed intentionally this way.

Is there any way we can escalate this further? The demand is there for the platform, but we cant use it without controls for members to restrict invitations.

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I just want to add my support for this proposal. As it stands, ChatGPT Teams is unusable for our use case. We want to use it for students in a distributed environment. The inability to prevent members from inviting other members renders it impossible for us to proceed.

As it stands, we are having to look at other options, which is a pity. I would urge the development team to consider adding a simple toggle to the Team settings, which controls whether members can or cannot invite others.

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Thanks for the support Matt. If this gets enough traction it may make a material difference.

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