OpenAI is currently challenging a court order mandating that it preserve deleted ChatGPT conversations “indefinitely”, rather than permanently erasing them after 30 days as per its usual policy.
The company states it is compelled to retain these deleted conversations due to a court order issued as part of The New York Times’ copyright infringement lawsuit against it.
In a post on Thursday, OpenAI Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap confirmed that the company is appealing the court’s decision. Last month, a court ordered OpenAI to maintain “all output log data that would otherwise be deleted,” even if a user requests a conversation deletion or if privacy laws require OpenAI to erase the data.
OpenAI’s standard policy dictates that when a user deletes a conversation, it is retained for 30 days before permanent deletion. The company must now pause this policy until the court rules otherwise.
This court order will affect free, Pro, Plus, and Team ChatGPT users, KosovaPress reports. It will not impact ChatGPT Enterprise or ChatGPT Edu clients, or businesses with a zero-data retention agreement.
OpenAI reassures users that the data will not be public and that “only a small, audited legal and security team will be able to access the stored information for legal purposes.“
The prominent American newspaper sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023 for allegedly copying and using millions of the newspaper’s articles to train their artificial intelligence models, claiming copyright infringement. The publication argues that retaining user data could help preserve evidence to support its case.
