Your ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini chats aren’t as private as you think

It’s too easy to treat ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini as confidants. They are friendly, kind, curious and even intimate. But the secrets you share with them won’t necessarily stay private, especially once the courts get involved.

Anyone who regularly interacts with an AI chatbot needs to be careful about what they share, for a variety of reasons. For example, large AI vendors may use your inputs as training data for their models, and there is also a risk that your confidential information will leak into the wild via rapid injection attacks and other exploits.

But besides model training and security concerns, there’s another factor to consider before divulging your secrets to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or other AI chatbots: the long arm of the law.

The issue revolves around the legal status of AI cats, a topic that is receiving renewed interest in light of a Federal Court ruling in February.

In this case, a former CEO indicted for securities fraud and wire fraud was ordered to disclose discussions he had with Claude about his legal woes, and in particular details he shared about privileged discussions he had with his lawyers.

Normally, conversations you have with your legal advisor are inadmissible in court. But in his ruling, U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff argued that defendant Bradley Heppner lost that protection once he shared his privileged legal discussions with Claude.

Judge Rakoff’s decision sent shockwaves through the legal community, with Reuters reporting that lawyers advised clients to exercise caution when discussing legal matters with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and other AI chatbots.

Covering the waters is a second ruling issued on the same day as Rakoff’s, in which a U.S. district judge ruled that a woman who used an AI chatbot to assist in her own defense doesn’t I have to return his discussions. In his ruling, the judge said AI robots “are tools, not people.”

Now, these cases primarily focus on the legal status of AI when used by lawyers and their clients. When you chat with an AI about legal matters, is it the same as writing private notes to yourself in Microsoft Word, or are you sharing (in the eyes of the law) legal conversations with a third party who is therefore subject to a subpoena? Good question, and there is no definitive answer yet.

But the whole issue raises an important point: your conversations with ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini won’t necessarily stay private, and you should be aware of that every time you chat with them.

The general rule is that you shouldn’t say anything to an AI chatbot that you wouldn’t want to put in a group text – or, to be old-school, on the back of a postcard.

Also remember that deleting a chat doesn’t immediately clean it up. Anthropic and OpenAI will keep deleted and temporary chats on their servers for at least 30 days, while Google may keep Gemini chats for even longer depending on your Gemini app activity settings.