OpenAI ran its first-ever influencer brand trip over the weekend, flying a handful of creators to a luxury retreat in upstate New York for what it called Summer Club. The itinerary — farm-to-table dinners, beekeeping, a painting workshop, and tutorials on ChatGPT Work — was aesthetic enough to travel well on Instagram and TikTok. The comment sections were less obliging.
One creator was told she had sold her soul "for a nice hotel room." Another was asked whether she planned a get-ready-with-me video from inside an AI data center. A third appears to have deleted her Summer Club post entirely while leaving unrelated content up. A commenter interviewed by TechCrunch flagged a $5,000-a-night suite as the specific detail that tipped the trip from aspirational to tone-deaf.
The timing sharpened the reaction. OpenAI is finalizing a $500 billion deal to build a data center in Ohio, at a moment when the energy and water footprint of AI infrastructure has become a live political issue. The company also holds a $200 million contract with the Department of Defense. Several commenters cited both when explaining why a bucolic wellness retreat for paid creators struck the wrong note.
Key facts
- 01OpenAI flew influencers to an upstate New York resort for its first-ever creator brand trip, dubbed Summer Club.
- 02One negative comment cited a $5,000-a-night suite as the trigger for backlash.
- 03The trip landed as OpenAI prepares a $500 billion data center deal in Ohio and holds a $200 million Department of Defense contract.
- 04OpenAI hired Charles Porch, formerly Instagram's VP of global partnerships, as its first VP of global creative partnerships in February 2026.
- 05Anthropic and Microsoft Copilot have run similar creator events, including a Super Bowl trip in February, without comparable backlash.
The influencer response has been visible confusion. One attendee wrote on LinkedIn that she assumed followers would want behind-the-scenes tips on ChatGPT and did not anticipate any pushback at all.
“I didn't for one second consider it would be controversial”— Anonymous influencer, OpenAI Summer Club attendee, writing on LinkedIn
OpenAI framed the event as educational. Spokesperson Drew Pusateri said the company works with a range of creators to help people understand practical uses of ChatGPT, and that Summer Club was designed to give attendees hands-on time with the newly released ChatGPT Work, which drafts documents and presentations. The idea, he said, was that creators would then teach their audiences.
Pusateri added that OpenAI treats creators as a legitimate distribution channel alongside traditional press.
The strategy is not improvised. In February 2026, Vanity Fair reported that OpenAI hired Charles Porch as its first VP of global creative partnerships. Porch came from Instagram, where he held the equivalent role, and said his mandate was a listening tour of creative communities to shape product decisions. Summer Club is the first fully staged output of that hire.
OpenAI is also not alone. Anthropic hosted an influencer dinner for Claude, and Microsoft Copilot ran a creator trip to the Super Bowl in February. Neither drew anything close to the reaction Summer Club has produced. The difference is scale and salience: OpenAI is the household name in generative AI, ChatGPT is the product most consumers associate with the category, and the company's infrastructure spending has become a proxy for the whole industry's footprint.
There is also a structural mismatch the campaign did not resolve. Influencer brand trips work when the product's cultural position is broadly positive — a new phone, a beauty launch, a streaming series. They work less well when a meaningful share of the audience is actively skeptical of the category itself. Beekeeping does not answer questions about data-center water draw. A painting workshop does not address the Pentagon contract.
OpenAI's calculation is defensible on the numbers. Creators reach audiences that traditional press does not, and ChatGPT Work needs distribution beyond the enterprise buyers who already know it exists. The problem is that the same visibility that makes influencer marketing efficient also makes the aesthetic vulnerable when the surrounding news cycle is about $500 billion buildouts and defense contracts. Expect the next iteration to be quieter, smaller, and staged somewhere that photographs less like a Vanity Fair spread — the strategy will continue, but the optics team just learned an expensive lesson.
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