Mutemi / Mathenge, Okinyi, Kairu and Mulinya parliamentary petition against OpenAI and Sama over ChatGPT data-labelling conditions, Kenya (2023–ongoing)

In July 2023 four former Samasource Kenya data labellers — Richard Mwaura Mathenge, Mophat Ochieng Okinyi, Alex Mwaura Kairu, and Bill Kelvin Mulinya — lodged a public petition with Kenya's National Assembly, asking Parliament to investigate the conditions under which they and approximately 51 colleagues had performed reinforcement-learning-from-human-feedback (RLHF) safety work on OpenAI's ChatGPT through the Nairobi outsourcing vendor Sama between late 2021 and February 2022, and to legislate against the outsourcing chain that produced those conditions. The petitioners' counsel of record is Mercy Mutemi, managing partner of Nzili & Sumbi Advocates, with international communications and campaign support supplied by the UK tech-justice community-interest company Foxglove. The petition is the legislative arm of the Foxglove / Nzili & Sumbi Kenya docket — the parliamentary complement to the courtroom cases the cluster is running against Meta and Sama in the Motaung, 185-moderator and Tigray petitions — and the first instance, on this corpus's record, of a frontier-AI data-labelling workforce using a national parliamentary-petitions mechanism to seek statutory protections against the labour conditions of the AI supply chain.

Origins: the OpenAI / Sama RLHF pipeline, 2021–2022

The petition's evidentiary anchor is OpenAI's late-2021 outsourcing contract with Sama, under which Sama recruited a Nairobi-based workforce to label textual descriptions of sexual abuse, hate speech, and violence for OpenAI's content-moderation classifier — the tool that became the safety layer of ChatGPT. By the petitioners' own account, the workforce was organised into roughly three teams of around 36 workers at any given time, performing the work for hourly pay reported in subsequent coverage at USD 1.32 to USD 2 — with a maximum monthly take-home of approximately USD 170 — and with no psychosocial support provided despite routine exposure to text describing acts of bestiality, necrophilia, incestuous sexual violence, rape, defilement of minors, self-harm (including suicide), and murder. In February 2022, Sama abruptly terminated the OpenAI contract — by Truthout's account "eight months ahead of schedule" — leaving the workers without further employment from Sama on the OpenAI account and, in the petitioners' framing, without an exit pathway from the mental-health consequences of the work.

The first public account of those consequences appeared in TIME's January 2023 investigation into how Sama's Kenyan workforce had built ChatGPT's safety layer. By the time of the parliamentary petition six months later, the workers' own framing of those consequences had hardened into a clinical inventory: the petition reports, and subsequent reporting corroborates, that the workforce had developed post-traumatic stress disorder, paranoia, depression, anxiety, insomnia, and sexual dysfunction. Mophat Okinyi told the Guardian, in coverage filed shortly after the petition, that the work had "really damaged my mental health"; Richard Mathenge said it had "destroyed me completely".

The petition: substantive theory and asks

The petition's substantive theory is that the protections of Kenyan labour and occupational-safety law have not kept pace with the new category of work the AI supply chain has produced, and that the gap can only be closed by Parliament. The four petitioners ask the National Assembly's Public Petitions Committee to investigate the nature, conditions and operations of Sama and other Kenyan outsourcing companies through which US platforms — explicitly including Meta, TikTok, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI — perform their African content-moderation and data-labelling work. On the strength of that investigation, the petitioners ask the Committee to recommend that the Kenyan government (i) withdraw the operating licences of outsourcing companies found to have exploited Kenyan workers; (ii) enact a statutory regime regulating the outsourcing of "harmful and dangerous technology work"; (iii) amend the Employment Act and the Occupational Safety and Health Act to recognise exposure to extreme content as an occupational hazard and to extend the protections of those statutes to outsourced workers; and (iv) investigate the Ministry of Labour's alleged failure to protect Kenyan youth working in the AI supply chain.

The petition's framing of the underlying claim is that the visible global product — ChatGPT, and the consumer-AI moment it inaugurated — sits on top of an invisible Kenyan labour layer whose conditions are a matter for Kenyan public law. Mutemi told the press at the time that "the fortunes of Big Tech are currently built on the broken backs and minds of African youth"; Foxglove's Martha Dark, in a statement to ITWeb Africa, framed the petition as continuous with the Facebook-moderator dockets the cluster was already running — "ChatGPT is world-famous as a symbol of AI's potential. But like Facebook before it, its success is built on an army of hidden and underpaid people."

Campaign actors and tactics

The petition runs on a variant of the same Foxglove / Nzili & Sumbi template that the cluster developed in the Motaung case: Kenyan counsel of record is Mutemi, Foxglove supplies international communications and campaign infrastructure, and the worker-petitioners are the public face of the case. The variant lies in the venue and the plaintiff structure. The venue is parliamentary rather than judicial — Article 119 of the Kenyan Constitution gives any person the right to petition the National Assembly to consider any matter within its authority, and the petitioners use that mechanism to ask for legislative action that the courts, on their own, cannot deliver. The plaintiff structure is collective in form (four named individuals filing on behalf of approximately 51 colleagues) but built around a deliberately small and articulate front rank, each of whom carried an identifiable public-facing role in the post-filing press cycle.

The most public of the four is Richard Mathenge, who in May 2023 had been among the 150 African content moderators voting to found the African Content Moderators Union at the Nairobi summit at which Nzili & Sumbi was named as union counsel, and who later in 2023 was listed on the inaugural TIME100 AI roster on the strength of his organising. Foxglove's Cori Crider and Martha Dark were the cluster's most-quoted external voices in the post-filing press wave — Dark on the political framing, Crider on the legal framing. The four-petitioner front rank means the case carries the press-cycle benefits of an individual-whistleblower template (named voices, quotable testimony, photographable plaintiffs) while preserving the legitimacy of a collective workforce claim.

The political opening for the case is the May 2023 Nairobi content-moderation summit — the founding moment of the African Content Moderators Union — at which Facebook, TikTok and ChatGPT moderators converged for the first time and voted in common to organise. The parliamentary petition was filed two months later by the union's ChatGPT contingent, and is best understood as that contingent's parallel-track action: where the 185 former Facebook moderators' suit is the union founding cohort's judicial vehicle, the OpenAI/Sama parliamentary petition is its legislative one.

Procedural posture and reception

OpenAI issued its first formal public statement on its Sama arrangements in the week of filing, telling ITWeb Africa: "We recognise this is challenging work for our researchers and annotation workers in Kenya and around the world – their efforts to ensure the safety of AI systems have been immensely valuable." The company stated that it had "ethical and wellness standards" in place but did not specify what they were, did not address the petitioners' specific allegations of inadequate psychosocial support, did not commit to any remedy, and did not indicate any change in policy or arrangements. Sama's prior position — restated in coverage at the time — was that it welcomed audits and considered its wages fair. Kenya's Ministry of Labour declined to comment.

The petition triggered international coverage in TechCrunch, the Guardian, TIME, the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, ITWeb Africa and others, and brought the four named petitioners onto the global media record as the public face of the OpenAI/Sama ChatGPT-safety workforce. Within a few months the public-facing arc of the campaign had already produced one durable side-effect: the inclusion of Richard Mathenge on TIME100 AI 2023, which framed his organising and his role on this petition as continuous parts of the same advocacy.

The parliamentary process itself, however, has not produced an analogue to the procedural milestones the same lawyers have secured in the Kenyan courts on the Motaung, 185-moderator and Tigray dockets. At the time of writing no Public Petitions Committee report, no committee recommendation, no statutory amendment, and no licence withdrawal traceable to this petition has been recorded in publicly available sources — a procedural silence consistent with the slower clock of the Kenyan parliamentary-petitions mechanism, but a silence nonetheless.

Status

As of May 2026 the petition has been on the National Assembly's record for almost three years. It has produced a substantial international and Kenyan public-record archive on the OpenAI/Sama ChatGPT-safety workforce — and it has produced the press-cycle evidentiary base on which subsequent Kenyan AI labour advocacy has built — but it has not produced a publicly recorded legislative or executive output. The petition's status is therefore best described as active but not procedurally productive: the formal asks it placed before Parliament in July 2023 remain on the order paper rather than at the centre of any visible committee process. It sits inside the broader Foxglove–Nzili & Sumbi Kenya docket — alongside the Motaung petition, the 185-moderator suit, and the Tigray petition — as that docket's parliamentary-track entry, and as the docket's principal vehicle for the OpenAI/Sama prong of the ChatGPT supply-chain question.

Significance for the broader AI-good movement

The petition is the corpus's clearest mapped instance of a frontier-AI data-labelling workforce using a national parliamentary-petitions mechanism to seek statutory protections against the AI supply chain. Where the Motaung suit and the 185-moderator suit used Kenyan constitutional-employment law to put the labour conditions of the Facebook content-moderation pipeline on the African judicial record, this petition uses Article 119 of the Kenyan Constitution to put the labour conditions of the OpenAI/ChatGPT RLHF pipeline on the African legislative record — extending the worker-side strategy of the Foxglove / Nzili & Sumbi cluster from content moderation into the training-data layer of the AI supply chain itself.

For the wider movement around making AI broadly beneficial, the petition's significance is threefold. First, it is the first published instance, in this corpus's coverage, of an African legislature being asked by name to regulate the outsourcing of frontier-AI training-data work — a step beyond the moderation-workforce frame to the question of how the AI model itself is produced. Second, it converts the May 2023 founding of the African Content Moderators Union from a workforce convening into a recognisable political-actor identity: the union's ChatGPT contingent is, in this petition, an actor in Kenyan public law. Third, it puts the labour underpinnings of the consumer-AI moment of late 2022 onto the Kenyan public record at a level of granularity — named workers, pay bands, contract dates, mental-health diagnoses, the categorical inventory of harmful content reviewed — that subsequent campaigns by the Africa Tech Workers Movement and the African Content Moderators Union have been able to build on rather than re-litigate. Its statutory output may still be pending; its evidentiary and discursive output has already shaped the terms on which African AI labour is being argued.