A free weekend at a fancy farm retreat sounds like an easy yes. For a group of influencers who went to an OpenAI event in upstate New York, that yes came with a lot of angry commenters attached.
The company also used the trip to train guests on its products, including the recently launched ChatGPT Work, which handles tasks like writing documents and building presentations.
The influencers posted the kind of polished content you would expect: one built a website on camera, another showed a brochure for a painting workshop. It looked like a typical brand trip, until the replies filled up.
Comments on the posts were mostly hostile. Commenters accused attendees of selling out for a free hotel stay, and one creator posting on TikTok and Instagram faced questions about the environmental harm of data centers, the massive buildings that run AI services.
Another attendee got asked whether she would film a "get-ready-with-me" video inside a data center. A third influencer appeared to delete her trip video after TechCrunch contacted her, while her posts that did not mention OpenAI stayed up.
The setting made the criticism sharper. OpenAI was hosting a nature retreat while preparing a $500 billion Ohio data center deal, and data centers are already under scrutiny for what they take from communities and the environment.
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Some commenters also brought up OpenAI's $200 million Department of Defense contract. Others noted that a suite there costs $5,000 a night, which seemed like poor timing when the world already has bigger problems to argue about.
One influencer wrote on LinkedIn that she expected people to want inside advice about OpenAI tools. Instead, she found that many people are opposed to AI, and she said she never expected the trip to be controversial.
OpenAI's spokesperson, Drew Pusateri, said the event was about education. "Creators are an important part of our community and how people get information and learn about our products today," he said. "We welcome healthy debate as AI becomes more prevalent."
OpenAI is not the first AI company to court influencers. Anthropic reportedly held a dinner for Claude, its AI assistant, and Microsoft took influencers to the Super Bowl for Copilot in February.
The OpenAI retreat generated more negative reaction than those earlier efforts.
The company has been building toward closer ties with creators for a while. In February, Vanity Fair reported that OpenAI hired Charles Porch, Instagram's former VP of global partnerships, to take a newly created role focused on creative partnerships.
Porch said he planned to go on a "listening tour" with creative communities "to figure out how we build the best products to serve them." A luxury retreat may not have looked like listening to the people commenting on those posts.
The retreat fit into a wider pattern.
The blowback is not just a public relations headache for OpenAI. Public opinion can shape how fast people adopt AI tools, how much scrutiny regulators apply, and how much trust the whole industry earns.
That trust is an investment issue. If people start seeing AI as a force that takes too much from local communities, the companies building it may face slower growth and higher costs.
Data centers need land, water, power, and huge amounts of construction money, and the more visible those bills become, the more pushback grows.
By August 3, 2026, this retreat had become part of a wider argument about who gets to shape AI and who pays for it. Some companies will handle that argument better than others, and in time that difference tends to show up in your portfolio.
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