OpenAI sent a handful of creators to a luxury resort in upstate New York this past weekend. Farm-to-table dinners, beekeeping, a painting workshop, a crash course on using ChatGPT better. The company called it “Summer Club.” The internet called it tone-deaf.
The trip was OpenAI’s first influencer brand event, and the backlash arrived almost as fast as the reels did. Commenters accused one creator of selling her soul for a nice hotel room. Another got asked, only half-joking, whether she’d film a get-ready-with-me segment while touring a data center. A third influencer quietly deleted her trip video and kept the rest of her content up.
None of this is really about beekeeping.
The optics problem money can’t fix
OpenAI is mid-negotiation on a $500 billion deal to build a data center in Ohio, right as how much water and power ChatGPT actually burns per query turns into a mainstream talking point. It also holds a $200 million Department of Defense contract, the same kind of military tie that already drew public scrutiny earlier this year. Neither detail made it into the influencer content. Both showed up immediately in the replies.
That’s the gap that sank this campaign. OpenAI treated the trip as a product-adoption play, hiring “celebrity whisperer” Charles Porch — poached from Instagram, where he ran global partnerships — to build exactly this kind of creator relationship. Commenters treated it as a company asking them to ignore its footprint for a $5,000-a-night suite.
Everyone’s doing this. Only OpenAI got burned
Anthropic has reportedly hosted its own influencer dinner for Claude, a company that’s built part of its brand on walking away from deals OpenAI accepted. Microsoft flew creators to the Super Bowl for Copilot, as the newsletter Sarah and Kate first reported. Neither drew anything close to this reaction.
The difference is timing and target. OpenAI is the company most associated, fairly or not, with AI’s downstream costs — energy use, job anxiety, the sense that the technology is being built faster than anyone agreed to. Sending creators to a spa while that conversation peaks doesn’t read as generous. It reads as oblivious.
One influencer who posted from the trip wrote on LinkedIn that she didn’t expect the backlash, that she thought people wanted “behind-the-scenes tips and tricks.” She wasn’t wrong that an audience exists for that content. She picked the wrong audience to reach it with.
What OpenAI actually bought
Porch said in February his job was to run a “listening tour” on how people relate to AI tools. This weekend, he got one — just not the version anyone at OpenAI planned for. The company now knows, in real time and in public, exactly how skeptical its potential customers still are. That’s expensive market research, even before the resort bill.
Related: ChatGPT Reached 1 Billion Users. Why Is Its Biggest Lead Now Shrinking?
