take the flak

take the flak (third-person singular simple present takes the flak, present participle taking the flak, simple past took the flak, past participle taken the flak)

1. (intransitive, informal) To be strongly criticised.

   The manager's going to take the flak for taking our star player off the pitch.

   • 2022 April 15, Steven Johnson, Nikita Iziev, “A.I. Is Mastering Language. Should We Trust What It Says?”, in The New York Times‎, →ISSN:

     “When we released GPT-3,” Sam Altman told me over lunch at a restaurant off the Embarcadero in San Francisco, “we took a lot of flak from the community for putting it behind the API” […]