A court is making OpenAI keep your chats — even the deleted ones

In the New York Times copyright case, a U.S. court ordered OpenAI to preserve ChatGPT and API logs indefinitely — overriding the company’s own 30-day deletion policy and users’ deletion requests. The order was affirmed on appeal, and for consumer and standard API users without a Zero-Data-Retention contract, it remains in force.

Read that again: a dispute you are not a party to can compel a vendor to keep your prompts — the contracts, the patient notes, the deal terms you typed in — long after you asked for them to be deleted. With cloud AI, “delete” was always a setting the vendor controlled, not a guarantee you held.

The Stavryn take

You never actually owned the data you put into someone else’s model. A court, a subpoena, or a quiet policy change can put it beyond your reach.
On-prem, retention is your call — there is no third party who can be ordered to keep your data, because there is no third party.

Coverage: Terms.law; OpenAI’s own response. More in what private AI means.