European alternatives to ChatGPT
The chatbot that put generative AI in everyone's hands, from OpenAI. It's a US company running on Microsoft Azure, and by default your conversations can be used to improve the models unless you opt out.
Company information about ChatGPT
- Company
- OpenAI Inc.
- Headquarters
- San Francisco, United States
- Founded
- 2022
- Data jurisdiction
- United States
- Ownership
- VC-backed
- GDPR
- No
- Open source
- No
- Infrastructure
- Microsoft Azure
Why people switch away from ChatGPT
Underpaid Kenyan moderators
Kenyan workers who labelled OpenAI's most disturbing training data were paid around $2 an hour by contractor Sama despite a $12.50 rate, and several reported PTSD from the material.
Sued over copyrighted training data
The New York Times and other publishers sued OpenAI in 2023, alleging ChatGPT was trained on millions of copyrighted articles without permission or payment.
Answers to US law
OpenAI is a US company running on Microsoft Azure, putting conversations under the CLOUD Act and outside GDPR's direct reach.
Everyday annoyances
- Free tier gets deprioritised. Free usage is capped and pushed behind paid tiers during high demand, with the strongest models reserved for subscribers.
- Chats train future models by default. Unless you opt out in settings, conversation history is used to improve OpenAI's models, an easy setting to miss during signup.
- Outages follow big launches. Major feature releases have repeatedly been followed by hours-long outages and degraded performance as demand spikes.
- Plan tiers keep multiplying. Free, Plus, Pro, Team and Enterprise plans with shifting usage caps make it hard to know what a given price actually includes.
- Confidently wrong answers. ChatGPT still produces fabricated facts and citations with total confidence, a well-documented 'hallucination' problem across every version.
European alternatives to ChatGPT
France's leading AI lab. Powerful open-weight models built and hosted entirely in Europe.
German sovereign AI provider. Pharia and Luminous models trained and hosted entirely in Europe, built for enterprise compliance.
Want more options? Browse all European AI tools & APIs alternatives →
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Microsoft Copilot Start somewhere.
Switching everything overnight is not realistic. Start where it matters most: your email, your cloud storage, your business tools. Replace one thing at a time.
The European Alternative already exists.
Pick Europe.
Why avoid United States-owned services?
CLOUD Act
Forces US companies to hand over data stored anywhere in the world upon government request, including data on European servers.
FISA Section 702
Authorises mass surveillance of non-US persons using data held by US tech platforms, without a warrant or notification.
GDPR vs US law conflict
EU courts have repeatedly found that US surveillance law conflicts with European fundamental rights. Schrems I and II both invalidated EU-US data transfer agreements.