Think Before You Prompt: Anything You Tell ChatGPT Could Become Evidence In Court

If you’ve ever poured your heart out to ChatGPT at 2am – whether about your ex, your boss, or your bank balance – here’s a plot twist you won’t like. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has warned that those conversations are not legally protected and, yes, they could be used against you in court.

Speaking on Theo Von’s This Past Weekend podcast, Altman said: “So, if you go talk to ChatGPT about your most sensitive stuff and then there’s like a lawsuit or whatever, like we could be required to produce that. And I think that’s very screwed up.”

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It’s not just live chats at risk. Thanks to an ongoing lawsuit brought by The New York Times, OpenAI is required to retain deleted conversations too. In other words, even if you hit the trash button, the data is still there.

Altman compared the current situation to the confidentiality protections that exist for lawyers, doctors, and therapists. “Right now, if you talk to a therapist or a lawyer or a doctor about those problems, there’s legal privilege for it. There’s doctor-patient confidentiality, there’s legal confidentiality, whatever. And we haven’t figured that out yet for when you talk to ChatGPT,” he explained. “I think we should have, like, the same concept of privacy for your conversations with AI that we do with a therapist or whatever.”

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Sam Altman and husband Oliver Mulherin. Image @lefigarofr via Pinterest

With more people turning to AI for everything from medical questions to late-night therapy-lite sessions, the lack of a clear legal framework is becoming a glaring issue. Altman said it’s reasonable for users “to really want the privacy clarity before you use [ChatGPT] a lot – like the legal clarity.”

He isn’t alone in his concerns. Policymakers, according to Altman, agree that this gap needs urgent attention. Without it, users are stuck in a grey zone, unsure whether what they type could one day resurface in a subpoena.

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Altman also flagged the bigger picture – surveillance. “I am worried that the more AI in the world we have, the more surveillance the world is going to want,” he said. Governments, he noted, will want to ensure AI isn’t being used for terrorism or other threats. While Altman admitted he is “totally willing to compromise some privacy for collective safety,” he added: “History is that the government takes that way too far, and I’m really nervous about that.”

So the takeaway? Until laws catch up, think twice before you spill your deepest secrets into a chatbot. Your AI bestie could, technically, be Exhibit A.