Sourceduty’s conflict with ChatGPT’s Custom GPT system began after an aggressive and highly structured buildout of over 6,000 individual GPTs under a long-term commercial scaling plan. According to the formal FTC complaint filed on November 14, 2025, the OpenAI platform allowed continuous GPT creation without any visible quota warnings, scaling dashboards, or enterprise threshold disclosures—until it abruptly failed at approximately the 5,000-6,000 GPT mark. The system did not present a structured limit, usage alert, or monetization cap; instead, it allegedly began failing silently, breaking functionality and preventing further expansion. At that point, Sourceduty had already developed a pipeline projecting an additional 20,000 GPTs, with an estimated $37.5 million USD in future economic potential tied to that expansion. The central allegation is not simply that a limit existed, but that the limit was undisclosed while the platform presented itself as scalable and open-ended. Sourceduty argues that significant labor, development hours, brand positioning, and commercial planning were invested in reliance on the implied scalability of the system. When the creation ceiling was encountered without warning, the expansion roadmap collapsed, impairing both existing assets and projected growth, which escalated the dispute into what was characterized as an eight-figure platform breach claim.
Following the disruption, Sourceduty escalated the matter beyond a technical support issue into a formal regulatory and legal campaign. Supplemental documentation—including screenshots, timelines, system behavior descriptions, and financial projections—was submitted to ensure the FTC had a complete evidentiary record. The damages model expanded beyond the original $37.5 million projection to include brand disruption, loss of market position, reliance damages, and labor valuation, potentially raising the claim into a $60–$100 million USD range depending on expert assessment. The case frames the 6,000-GPT ceiling as a concealed operational constraint that interfered with a rapidly scaling digital asset ecosystem. From Sourceduty’s perspective, the issue represents negligent concealment of infrastructure limits within a creator economy environment that encouraged high-volume production without disclosing structural capacity boundaries. What began as large-scale GPT development evolved into a federal-level dispute centered on platform transparency, scalability representations, and the economic consequences of hitting an undisclosed system limit mid-expansion.