ChatGPT will no longer delete past conversations
Now this feels more like a privacy red flag than a feature.
It seems ChatGPT will now remember more than you want it to, even the parts you thought you’d erased forever.
In a surprising twist, OpenAI has revealed that it is now required to store all user conversations indefinitely, including chats users have actively deleted. This came from a court order tied to the ongoing copyright lawsuit filed by The New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft.
The lawsuit, filed in late 2023, accuses both companies of using Times content to train AI models without permission. But, the stakes escalated recently when a federal judge in New York ruled that OpenAI must preserve “all output log data that would otherwise be deleted.” What this means is that even if you delete your conversation, OpenAI must now keep it, at least for the foreseeable future.
Emmanuel Oyedeji
Until this ruling, OpenAI had a relatively privacy-conscious policy. Deleted chats would disappear from your account immediately and were scheduled for permanent removal from OpenAI’s servers within 30 days. That policy is now effectively suspended for millions of users on Free, Plus, Pro, and Team plans.
However, the change doesn’t affect everyone. ChatGPT Enterprise, ChatGPT Edu, and API customers using Zero Data Retention endpoints remain exempt from this ruling. If you're not in one of those categories, those awkward questions and private thoughts shared with the chatbot are now being retained.
OpenAI isn’t thrilled. In a blog post, the company emphasized that it’s retaining the data solely because it’s legally required to, and that it’s being stored in a secure, segregated system, accessible only to a small, audited legal and security team.
While the order feels like a stretch, the logic behind it is that The Times hopes that preserving all ChatGPT outputs might help uncover instances of users accessing paywalled content or getting summaries of its articles, evidence that could support its copyright infringement claims.
While this is no inconvenience for some, for many users, the idea that ChatGPT remembers everything, especially conversations they believed were erased, feels more like a privacy red flag than a feature.
So, unless you're on Enterprise, Edu, or using Zero Data Retention settings, you should assume your conversations are now being stored indefinitely.
