Thom said he found it notable that OpenAI had shown such a precise grasp of his techniques, which at the time he did not consider the most obvious path toward a solution. He contacted Sébastien Bubeck and Mark Sellke — OpenAI researchers, with Sellke also holding a position as a statistician at Harvard — to ask whether his ChatGPT conversations had been incorporated into the company's training data or made available to its reasoning process. Thom said the reply he received was narrowly confined to the question of direct access to his conversations, leaving entirely unanswered whether those conversations had ever become part of the company's training pipeline. "No such qualification, explanation, or evidence was given," he wrote, according to The Verge. "I take this as dishonesty to say the least."