A high profile legal case there could set a precedent for AI intellectual property protection, but meanwhile incurring some collateral damage.
As part of an ongoing copyright lawsuit brought by The New York Times and other publishers, the makers of ChatGPT have been ordered by a federal US court to preserve all user conversations with ChatGPT, including those users have deleted.
The order, issued by Magistrate Judge Ona T Wang in May 2025, marks a significant shift in how OpenAI handles user data, and has triggered concerns about privacy and data retention practices.
The plaintiffs allege that OpenAI’s language models had been trained on millions of copyrighted articles without permission, and that ChatGPT has at times reproduced content closely resembling or directly quoting from The New York Times and other paywalled sources. Therefore, deleted user chats could contain evidence of such copyright violations, such as prompts that elicit summaries or verbatim excerpts from protected articles.
In response, the court has instructed OpenAI to halt its standard practice of erasing deleted chats after 30 days, instead requiring the firm to retain all output logs, including those previously marked for deletion or flagged as temporary.
This order affects users of ChatGPT Free, Plus, Pro, and Team, as well as API customers without a Zero Data Retention (ZDR) agreement. However, it does not apply to ChatGPT Enterprise, ChatGPT Edu, or API users with ZDR endpoints, who continue to benefit from stricter privacy protections.
OpenAI executives have criticized the ruling, calling it an “overreach” that could undermine user trust and potentially conflict with privacy laws such as the EU’s “right to be forgotten.” CEO Sam Altman has publicly questioned whether AI conversations should be treated with the same confidentiality as discussions with doctors or lawyers.
For now, all affected ChatGPT conversations — including those that users believe have been deleted — are being stored in a secure, segregated system accessible only to a limited legal and security team at OpenAI, which has lodged an appealed against the order. Until a decision is reached, users are advised to assume that their conversations may be retained indefinitely. The outcome of this case could set a major precedent for the intersection of privacy, copyright, and AI technology.
Until a decision is reached, users are advised to assume that their conversations may be retained indefinitely. The outcome of this case could set a major precedent for the intersection of privacy, copyright, and AI technology.
