OpenAI Flew Influencers to a Luxury Retreat. The Backlash Was Louder Than the Content.

Key points

• OpenAI hosted its first influencer brand trip, called "Summer Club," at a nature retreat outside New York City where rooms cost more than $2,000 per night.
• Most of the invited creators post about workplace culture and business, and many appeared to be young women, which drew accusations that OpenAI was targeting a specific demographic.
• Reaction videos criticising the trip collected more than half a million combined views, far exceeding the original posts from the influencers themselves.
• OpenAI confirmed creator marketing is part of how it reaches the public, calling creators "an important part of our community."
• Rival company Anthropic has run quieter influencer dinners at trendy venues, and reports suggest a second OpenAI trip is being planned for the West Coast.

Last weekend, a handful of content creators started posting from what OpenAI billed as its first ever brand trip. The setting was a lush retreat outside New York City, widely identified as Wildflower Farms, where rooms run north of $2,000 a night. Branded pyjamas, monogrammed merch, woodland views. For the influencers involved, it looked like a win.

The public disagreed, loudly.

What actually happened?

The backlash swamped the original posts within days. Grace McCarrick, a workplace-culture creator with 145,000 TikTok followers, posted a vlog from her suite. Nat Lucy, who has 57,000 followers, filmed a deer outside her cabin. Neither video set any records: McCarrick's clip gathered fewer than 300 likes, and Lucy's under 15,000 views. But reaction videos attacking the trip combined for more than half a million views.

Commenters landed on a few overlapping complaints. Some pointed to the environmental cost of AI, particularly the vast data centres that consume enormous amounts of water and electricity. Others questioned why so many of the creators appeared to be young women. According to Pew Research, women are twice as likely as men to say AI will affect them personally and negatively, even as overall usage rates between the genders have nearly equalised. The worry, spelled out in comment after comment, was that these women were being used to soften the public image of an industry they had reason to distrust.

McCarrick pushed back. On LinkedIn she wrote that she had "genuinely had no idea that people were this anti-AI" and described the anger as "shocking AI psychosis running rampant online," using the word loosely to mean irrational fear rather than the clinical meaning. Several other influencers who attended have not commented publicly.

What does OpenAI say?

The company confirmed the trip was intentional outreach. "Creators are an important part of our community and how people get information and learn about our products today," spokesperson Edie Campbell-Urban told The Verge AI in an email. OpenAI said the event was meant to be educational and that it welcomes "healthy debate as AI becomes more prevalent."

For context, Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI assistant, has taken a lower-key version of the same approach, hosting influencer dinners at fashionable restaurants rather than full retreats.

Why does this matter to ordinary people?

It matters because influencer marketing is now a recognised way that AI companies shape public opinion, and this trip made that visible in an unusually raw way.

The content itself was thin: lifestyle shots, freebies, vague captions. There were no detailed explainers about how ChatGPT works, no on-camera Q&As with engineers, no frank talk about job displacement. That gap between the glossy packaging and the absent substance is exactly what enraged viewers.

For anyone who follows creators in the career or business space, it is worth knowing that the companies those creators partner with can include AI firms with a direct interest in how you feel about workplace automation.

Watch for: creators in the business and productivity space who suddenly post positive, vague AI content without clear disclosure that a company paid for or invited them. In the US, the Federal Trade Commission requires creators to disclose sponsored trips and gifted products. If you do not see a disclosure, that is worth noting.