OpenAI has responded to user panic over a sweeping court order that requires the retention of chat logs for an indefinite period of time. This court order was issued after news organizations suing over copyright claims accused the AI company of destroying evidence. Those organizations including The New York Times, expressed concerns that ChatGPT might be used to bypass paywalls and “delete their searches to cover their tracks.”
The judge Ona Wang agreed that OpenAI likely would never stop deleting that alleged evidence absent a court order, and granted the news plaintiffs’ request to preserve all chats.
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“Before OpenAI had an opportunity to respond to those unfounded accusations, the court ordered OpenAI to preserve and segregate all output log data that would otherwise be deleted on a going forward basis until further order of the Court (in essence, the output log data that OpenAI has been destroying),” OpenAI explained in a court filing demanding oral arguments in a bid to block the controversial order.
OpenAI stated in the filing that the court rushed the order based on “a hunch” raised by The New York Times, and other news organizations. “The New York Times and other plaintiffs have made a sweeping and unnecessary demand in their baseless lawsuit against us: retain consumer ChatGPT and API customer data indefinitely. This fundamentally conflicts with the privacy commitments we have made to our users. It abandons long-standing privacy norms and weakens privacy protections,” OpenAI COO Brian Lightcap said.
The company also argued the May 13 order was premature and should be vacated until “at a minimum,” news organizations can establish a substantial need for OpenAI to preserve all chat logs.
OpenAI also argued that there was “no evidence beyond speculation,” that the company had intentionally deleted data, and that there wasn’t “a single piece of evidence supporting” claims that copyright-infringing ChatGPT users are more likely to delete their chats.
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Wang had brought up a hypothetical scenario with regard to this during a conference in January. She asked OpenAI’s legal team to consider a ChatGPT user who “found some way to get around the paywall” and “was getting The New York Times content somehow as the output.” If that user “then hears about this case and says, ‘Oh, whoa, you know I’m going to ask them to delete all of my searches and not retain any of my searches going forward,’” the judge asked, wouldn’t that be “directly the problem” that the order would address?
OpenAI argued that risks of breaching privacy agreements would not only affect users, but also risk putting the company in breach of contracts and global privacy regulations. The company also stated that complying with the order would impose “significant burden” on it, forcing it to spend months of engineering hours at substantial costs to comply. OpenAI stated its potential for harm far outweighs news plaintiffs’ speculative need for such data.
OpenAI also elaborated on how the sweeping court order affected users, mentioning that ChatGPT had a number of “highly confidential and personal use cases.” The company also clarified this affected ChatGPT Free, Plus, Pro, and Team users as well as users of the OpenAI API without a Zero Data Retention agreement. However, it does not affect ChatGPT Enterprise or ChatGPT Edu customers, as well as API users using Zero Data Amendment endpoints.