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New judges ruling makes OpenAI keeping a record of all your ChatGPT chats one
step closer to reality

Date:
Tue, 24 Jun 2025 22:00:00 +0000

Description:
A court maintained a ruling forcing OpenAI to retain all ChatGPT chats after
rejecting petitions from users.

FULL STORY

OpenAI will be holding onto all of your conversations with ChatGPT and
possibly sharing them with a lot of lawyers, even the ones you thought you
deleted. That's the upshot of an order from the federal judge overseeing a
lawsuit brought against OpenAI by The New York Times over copyright
infringement. Judge Ona Wang upheld her earlier order to preserve all ChatGPT
conversations for evidence after rejecting a motion by ChatGPT user Aidan
Hunt, one of several from ChatGPT users asking her to rescind the order over
privacy and other concerns. 

Judge Wang told OpenAI to indefinitely preserve ChatGPTs outputs since the
Times pointed out that would be a way to tell if the chatbot has illegally
recreated articles without paying the original publishers. But finding those
examples means hanging onto every intimate, awkward, or just private
communication anyone's had with the chatbot. Though what users write isn't
part of the order, it's not hard to imagine working out who was conversing
with ChatGPT about what personal topic based on what the AI wrote. In fact,
the more personal the discussion, the easier it would probably be to identify
the user. 

Hunt pointed out that he had no warning that this might happen until he saw a
report about the order in an online forum. and is now concerned that his
conversations with ChatGPT might be disseminated, including highly sensitive
personal and commercial information. He asked the judge to vacate the order 
or modify it to leave out especially private content, like conversations
conducted in private mode, or when there are medical or legal matters
discussed. 

According to Hunt, the judge was overstepping her bounds with the order
because this case involves important, novel constitutional questions about 
the privacy rights incident to artificial intelligence usage  a rapidly
developing area of law  and the ability of a magistrate [judge] to institute 
a nationwide mass surveillance program by means of a discovery order in a
civil case. 

Judge Wang rejected his request because they aren't related to the copyright
issue at hand. She emphasized that it's about preservation, not disclosure,
and that it's hardly unique or uncommon for the courts to tell a private
company to hold onto certain records for litigation. Thats technically
correct, but, understandably, an everyday person using ChatGPT might not feel
that way. 

She also seemed to particularly dislike the mass surveillance accusation,
quoting that section of Hunt's petition and slamming it with the legal
language equivalent of a diss track. Judge Wang added a "[sic]" to the quote
from Hunt's filing and a footnote pointing out that the petition "does not
explain how a courts document retention order that directs the preservation,
segregation, and retention of certain privately held data by a private 
company for the limited purposes of litigation is, or could be, a nationwide
mass surveillance program. It is not. The judiciary is not a law enforcement
agency." 

That 'sic burn' aside, there's still a chance the order will be rescinded or
modified after OpenAI goes to court this week to push back against it as part
of the larger paperwork battle around the lawsuit.

Deleted but not gone 

Hunt's other concern is that, regardless of how this case goes, OpenAI will
now have the ability to retain chats that users believed were deleted and
could use them in the future. There are concerns over whether OpenAI will 
lean into protecting user privacy over legal expedience. OpenAI has so far
argued in favor of that privacy and has asked the court for oral arguments to
challenge the retention order that will take place this week. The company has
said it wants to push back hard on behalf of its users. But in the meantime,
your chat logs are in limbo. 

Many may have felt that writing into ChatGPT is like talking to a friend who
can keep a secret. Perhaps more will now understand that it still acts like a
computer program, and the equivalent of your browser history and Google 
search terms are still in there. At the very least, hopefully, there will be
more transparency. Even if it's the courts demanding that AI companies retain
sensitive data, users should be notified by the companies. We shouldn't
discover it by chance on a web forum. 

And if OpenAI really wants to protect its users, it could start offering more
granular controls: clear toggles for anonymous mode, stronger deletion
guarantees, and alerts when conversations are being preserved for legal
reasons. Until then, it might be wise to treat ChatGPT a bit less like a
therapist and a bit more like a coworker who might be wearing a wire.

======================================================================
Link to news story:
https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/new-judges-ruling-
makes-openai-keeping-a-record-of-all-your-chatgpt-chats-one-step-closer-to-rea
lity

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