OpenAI's GPT Store is already getting flooded with spam

If you open OpenAI's GPT Store today hoping to find polished AI colleagues, you are more likely to run into a chaotic flea market of rip-offs and homework bypasses.

Back in November, Sam Altman pitched custom GPTs as bespoke mini-assistants built for almost any task. By January, OpenAI claimed creators had already built roughly 3 million of them.

Now, a report from TechCrunch reveals that the marketplace is quietly drowning in spam, blatant copyright infringements, and tools designed to dodge academic cheating detectors.

Star Wars text quests and undetectable essays

Getting a bot onto the store theoretically requires account verification alongside combined automated and human reviews. In reality, the quality filter feels wide open.

A quick search turns up unofficial bots that mimic Disney and Pixar art styles, run text adventures set in the Star Wars universe, or let users chat with trademarked characters like Wario. While OpenAI is likely shielded from copyright damages under DMCA safe harbor provisions, it is an uncomfortable look for a company already battling multiple major IP lawsuits.

Even more rampant are tools built to game school systems. Despite OpenAI explicitly banning tools that promote academic dishonesty, Humanizer Pro sits near the top of the store's Writing category, promising 100% human-looking scores to bypass detectors like Turnitin and Copyleaks.

Many of these GPTs serve as thinly veiled funnels for outside paywalls. Humanizer pushes users to a third-party plugin called GPTInf, which charges up to $12 a month on top of an existing $20 ChatGPT Plus fee. The store is also populated by celebrity parodies from Elon Musk to Joe Rogan, along with DAN-style jailbreak prompts aimed at slipping past safety guardrails.

Why it matters

OpenAI wants nothing more than to replicate Apple's wildly lucrative App Store playbook, but we think it skipped the hard part: rigorous curation and sustainable developer economics.

For regular users, the GPT Store right now simply is not worth scouring. Outside of a handful of official brand integrations, most listings are glorified system prompts that either hallucinate wildly or try to upsell you on dubious third-party subscriptions.

The real time bomb is OpenAI's upcoming revenue-sharing plan. When monetization goes live and unauthorized Harry Potter or Marvel bots start raking in actual platform payouts, studio legal teams are going to pounce immediately.

By lowering the creation bar to simple text prompts, OpenAI successfully juiced vanity metrics like having 3 million bots overnight. But as reported by The Information, legitimate builders are already frustrated by non-existent discoverability and barren analytics. If OpenAI cannot clean up the spam and back reputable developers soon, its dream of becoming the next major software platform will crumble into an unusable junk drawer.