Your AI Chats Can and Will Be Used Against You in the Court of Law

Think your ChatGPT and Claude chats are private or inaccessible because you deleted them? Think again. Your conversations with these LLMs aren’t private and deleting chat threads don’t mean the data is gone forever. If pressured by courts, companies like OpenAI and Anthropic can produce any and all conversations you’ve had with their chatbots.

Recently, a federal judge ruled that conversations with an AI chatbot are not protected by attorney-client privilege. Now attorneys are advising their clients to be cautious when using apps like ChatGPT and Claude with regard to legal matters. Lawyers say that chatbots should be treated like tools and not like legal advisors.

Bradley Heppner, former chair of GWG Holdings and former CEO of Beneficient, was charged with securities and wire fraud and used Claude to prepare documents for his attorneys. The judge presiding over the case requested those documents since the information contained in them were not protected by attorney-client privilege.

In another case involving Korean video game publisher Krafton’s CEO Changhan Kim, a court ordered the reproduction of Kim’s chats with ChatGPT planning to renege promises he made to a company Krafton acquired.

Krafton acquired Unknown Worlds, makers for Subnautica and Subnautica 2. Krafton promised Unknown Worlds an earnout payment if the company meet certain targets. When it became obvious those targets were going to be met, Kim used ChatGPT to craft his plan on not paying as promised. ChatGPT helped Kim with ousting the Unknown Worlds executives, but a judge, having reviewed the case and the deleted-but-recovered conversations with the LLM, reinstituted the executives.

As people turn to LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude for legal advice, attorneys are warning users to be careful with what they’re putting into these chatbots. The conversations aren’t always private, deleted chats can be reproduced for courts, and the contents can’t be protected by attorney-client privilege.