I was poking around ChatGPT today (for research purposes, I don’t use this service) when I saw something interesting with the map feature. Searching for “best restaurant in London” produces an in-chat map preview that can be clicked and expanded to this:
Screenshot of ChatGPT in Firefox, non-logged user after the query “Best restaurant in London”.
Now if you’re into open source software, and a half a map nerd, you might recognise the map as coming from OpenStreetMap (OSM). OSM is a community-driven project that provides map data to a variety of services. In simple terms, it’s a big database of map-related data (think streets, shops, opening hours, pavement type, buildings, etc.) that anyone can contribute to. If that sounds exciting I highly recommend StreetComplete as a fun way to start contributing ! But I digress.
I use CoMaps on mobile, Mapy in the browser and I contribute to OSM regularly so this kind of jumped out to me. Yet something was missing… looking at this page, there is no clear indication that this is indeed OSM.
So is my assumption wrong or is something going on here?
OSM has a clear attribution requirements established in their License
Where you use OpenStreetMap data, you are required to do the following two things:
- Provide credit to OpenStreetMap by displaying our attribution notice.
- Make clear that the data is available under the Open Database License.
…and Attribution Guidelines :
Attribution must be to “OpenStreetMap”.
Attribution must also make it clear that the data is available under the Open Database License. This may be done by making the text “OpenStreetMap” a link to openstreetmap.org/copyright, which has information about OpenStreetMap’s data sources (which OpenStreetMap needs to credit) as well as the ODbL.
Looking at Mapy or any of the other OSM-based tools I mentioned, the attribution is usually present at the bottom:
A screenshot of Mapy in Firefox. Attribution to OpenStreetMap is present and functional
On ChatGPT, this part of the screen is blurred. Could it be that…
Let’s open the browser Developers’ Tool and inspect the page’s code. First we search for a mention of OpenStreetMap.
It’s there! Let’s remove the blur effect.
This reveals an info button. But it cannot be clicked yet… Maybe if we remove the search bar?
Success! The button can be clicked and reveals the attribution.
So to make the attribution visible we had to:
- Remove all blur CSS to make the info button visible
- Remove the search bar which prevents the info button from being clicked
- Click the info button
What we found doing that:
- The map is actually provided by Mapbox, which uses OpenStreetMap data, as made clear by the attribution
- The attribution exists, it’s simply not visible or accessible by default
Digging a bit more, it appears that when the integration with Mapbox was announced in 2025, the information button was located in the top left corner, visible and clickable. This space is now occupied by a close button, so something went wrong during this UI change.
For what it’s worth, attribution is also required by Mapbox’s product terms:
1.4.1. Mandatory Attribution. When using any Service Offering, Customer shall include the following attribution, as further described in the Attribution Documentation (i) the Mapbox logo, (ii) “© Mapbox” that links to www.mapbox.com/about/maps, (iii) “© OpenStreetMap” that links to www.openstreetmap.org/about, and (iv) upon reasonable notice, other attribution, similar in size and placement to the notices specified in (ii) and (iii), as may be required by Mapbox’s suppliers and licensors; provided that the requirements in clauses (ii) and (iii) only apply when Customer accesses or uses Licensed Map Content.
There’s no point in trying to determine whether this is a voluntary decision or an accident. What matters is OpenAI fixing this so that attribution is visible again. The mobile app respects it, with a clearly visible info button which, funnily enough, allows loading webpage in the map dedicated frame when clicked. I’m not going to push this further but there might be interesting security implications…
ChatGPT on Android, showing attribution and loading a webpage…
At the end of the day, this is just a bug. It’s likely not malicious or something that was purposefully done to hide OpenStreetMap and Mapbox’s work. It’s a small element of the page’s design, small enough that most people wouldn’t notice it and even fewer people would click it. Yet, it does matter. In OSM Foundation’s own words: “Attribution encourages others to use OSM data by making obvious where it is coming from and under which conditions it can be used.” You never know when someone is going to notice this and fall down the rabbit hole of community-driven mapping. With the exposure of ChatGPT, it’s thousands of potential contributors that could be reached.
Attribution is how we show respect to open source projects and their contributors’ work. It’s how we raise awareness about amazing projects that start small but end up integrated into services distributed to millions of people (even when those projects are terrible in many aspects). Coming from a company with a heap of copyright lawsuits against them, a mistake like this, as small as it is, feels wrong. OpenAI is valued at $852 billion, an amount of money neither of us can comprehend but which should imply that care is given to the products they put out.
I guess that’s a bit too much to ask these days.
Note: I alerted both Mapbox and OpenAI about this issue and will update this post when this is fixed.