OpenAI Forced to Retain Chat Logs Indefinitely To Comply With Court Order
A court order by the Southern District of New York compels the company to retain all user chat logs indefinitely as part of a lawsuit filed by The New York Times.
The lawsuit, which was filed in December 2023, alleges that OpenAI used copyrighted material from The New York Times and other publications to train its large language model, and that ChatGPT can produce verbatim copies of published articles. The lawsuit also alleges that the chatbot allows users to circumvent the publication’s paywalls by prompting the AI to generate paragraphs from articles that would otherwise require payment to access.
As part of the lawsuit, The Times asked the court to compel OpenAI to retain all logs of ChatGPT conversations, arguing that failure to do so constitutes destruction of relevant evidence. After some back and forth, the court agreed and issued an order instructing OpenAI to retain and segregate all chat logs that would otherwise be deleted.
In response, OpenAI published a statement slamming the decision and dismissing The New York Times’ lawsuit as “baseless.” The statement clarifies that the order applies to all users with ChatGPT Free, Plus, Pro, and Team subscriptions. ChatGPT Enterprise and ChatGPT Edu customers, as well as API customers with Zero Data Retention endpoints, are not affected by the order.
The post goes on to explain that this data will be stored in a separate system and is under a legal hold, meaning it can’t be used for any other purposes and is only accessible by a “small, audited OpenAI legal and security team.”
Central to OpenAI’s argument is that the court order to retain chat logs is directly contradictory to its user privacy policies. This includes the “right to be forgotten” enshrined in Europe’s GDPR, which OpenAI might be in violation of thanks to this court order.
OpenAI has filed an appeal with the court asking the judge to reconsider the order. Whether or not the judge will reverse the decision remains to be seen, but we’ll keep you updated with any new developments in the case.