NB. There is no order to "collect". The order is to preserve what is already being collected and stored in the ordinary course of business

https://ia801404.us.archive.org/31/items/gov.uscourts.nysd.6...

https://ia801404.us.archive.org/31/items/gov.uscourts.nysd.6...

> What is the purpose of OpenAI storing millions of private conversations

Your previous ChatGPT conversations show up right in the ChatGPT interface.

They have to store the private conversations to enable users to bring them up in the interface.

This isn't a secretive, hidden data collection. It's a clear and obvious feature right in the product. They're fighting for the ability to not retain secret records of past conversations that have been deleted.

The problem with the court order is that it requires them to keep the conversations even after a user presses the 'Delete' button on them.

No it's not. It's literally a court order mandating them to collect this data.

- [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/08/openai-offers-20...

> What is the purpose of OpenAI storing millions of private conversations

Its needed for the conversation history feature, a core feature of the ChatGPT product

Its like saying "What is the purpose of Google Photos storing millions of private images"

News Plaintiffs October 15, 2025 Letter Motion to Compel

https://ia801205.us.archive.org/1/items/gov.uscourts.nysd.61...

OpenAI October 30, 2025 Letter Opposing Motion to Compel

https://ia601205.us.archive.org/1/items/gov.uscourts.nysd.61...

November 7, 2025 Order on Motion to Compel

https://ia601205.us.archive.org/1/items/gov.uscourts.nysd.61...

"OpenAI has failed to explain how its consumers privacy rights are not adequately protected by: (1) the existing protective order in this multidistrict litigation or (2) OpenAIs exhaustive de-identification of all of the 20 million Consumer ChatGPT Logs.1

1. As News Plaintiffs point out, OpenAI has spent the last two and a half months processing and deidentifying this 20 million record sample. (ECF 719 at 1 n.1)."

>What is the purpose of OpenAI storing millions of private conversations

Have you used ChatGPT? Your conversation history is on the left rail

> The documents requested are not being made public by the plaintiffs

In fact, as far as I understand it, they could not be made public by the plaintiffs even if they wanted to do so, or even if one of their employees decided to leak them.

That's because the plaintiffs themselves never actually see the documents. They will only be seen by the plaintiff's lawyers and any experts hired by those lawyers to analyze them.

If an analogy to the history of search engines can be made,^1 then we know that log retention policies in the US can change over time. The user has no control over such changes

https://ide.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/w23815.pdf

Companies operating popular www search engines might claim that the need for longer retention is "to provide better service" or some similar reason that focuses on users' interests rather than the company's interests^2

2. Generally, advertising services

This paper attempts to expose such claims as bogus

1. According to some reports OpenAI is sending some queries to Google

>Why has OpenAI collected and stored 20 million conversations (including "deleted chats")

To train the AI further. Obviously. Simple as.

Is there a technical limitation that prevents chat histories from being stored locally on the user's computer instead of being stored on someone else's computer(s)

Why do chat histories need to be accessible by OpenAI, its service partners and anyone with the authority to request them from OpenAI

If users want this design, as suggested by HN commenters, if users want their chat histories to be accessible to OpenAI, its service providers and anyone with authority to request them from OpenAI, then wouldn't it also be true that these users are not much concerned with "privacy"

If so, then why would OpenAI proclaim they are "fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy", knowing that NYT is prohibited from making the logs public and users generally do not care much about "privacy" anyway

The restrictions on plaintiff NYT's use of the logs are greater than the restrictions, if any,^1 on OpenAI's use of them

1. If any such restrictions existed, for example if OpenAI stated "We don't do X" in a "privacy policy" and people interpreted this as a legally enforceable restriction,^2 how would a user verify that the statement was true, i.e., that OpenAI has not violated the "restriction". Silicon Valley companies like OpenAI are highly secretive

2. As opposed to a statement by OpenAi of what OpenAI allegedly does not do. Compare with a potentially legally-enforceable promise such as "OpenAI will not do X". Also consider that OpenAI may do Y, Z, etc. and make no mention of it to anyone. As it happens Silicon Valley companies generally have a reputation for dishonesty

They infringed nothing. Two judges have already ruled that training on copyrighted data is fair use https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/two-california-distr...

People pretending to own Data that should belong to the commons is the larger issue.

NYT on the internet is pure garbage. I'm really sad that when they challenged Google they didn't just drop and ban them from the index. There's zero reason for NYT to pollute the internet for me and everyone like me that won't ever pay them a cent.

NYT links leading to a paywall are the worst kind of spam.

They should sell their stuff by mail if they hate open culture so much.

It's absolutely disgusting how they are allowed to freeload on the attention that the open culture provides, contributing nothing but short garbage blurbs that are worse than generated by LLMs.

Exactly. And the OpenAI corporates speak acting like they give a shit about our best interests. Give me a break, Sam Altman. How stupid do you think everyone is?

They have proven that they are the most untrustworthy company on the planet

And this isn't AI fear speaking. This is me raging at Sam Altman for spreading so much fear, uncertainty, and doubt just to get investments. The rest of us have to suffer for the last two years, worrying about losing our jobs, only to find out the AGI lie is complete bullsh*t.

I get the feeling, but that's not what this is.

NYTimes has produced credible evidence that OpenAI is simply stealing and republishing their content. The question they have to answer is "to what extent has this happened?"

That's a question they fundamentally cannot answer without these chat logs.

That's what discovery, especially in a copyright case, is about.

Think about it this way. Let's say this were a book store selling illegal copies of books. A very reasonable discovery request would be "Show me your sales logs". The whole log needs to be produced otherwise you can't really trust that this is the real log.

That's what NYTimes lawyers are after. They want the chat logs so they can do their own searches to find NYTimes text within the responses. They can't know how often that's happened and OpenAI has an obvious incentive to simply say "Oh that never happened".

And the reason this evidence is relevant is it will directly feed into how much money NYT and OpenAI will ultimately settle for. If this never happens then the amount will be low. If it happens a lot the amount will be high. And if it goes to trial it will be used in the damages portion assuming NYT wins.

The user has no right to privacy. The same as how any internet service can be (and have been) compelled to produce private messages.

> In copyright cases, typically you need to show some kind of harm.

NYT is suing for statutory copyright infringement. That means you only need to demonstrate that the copyright infringement, since the infringement alone is considered harm; the actual harm only matters if you're suing for actual damages.

This case really comes down to the very unsolved question of whether or not AI training and regurgitation is copyright infringement, and if so, if it's fair use. The actual ways the AI is being used is thus very relevant for the case, and totally within the bounds of discovery. Of course, OpenAI has also been engaging this lawsuit with unclean hands in the first place (see some of their earlier discovery dispute fuckery), and they're one of the companies with the strongest "the law doesn't apply to US because we're AI and big tech" swagger.

It is better if it is out in the open compared to just some select few diabolical organizations having access to it

> This case is unusual because the New York Times can't point to any harm

It helps to read the complaint. If that was the case, the case would have been subject to a Rule 12(b)(6) (failure to state a claim for which relief can be granted) challenge and closed.

Complaint: https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec20...

See pages 60ff.

No doubt. I’m sure NYT sees an opportunity to buy a few more years of life support by pickpocketing the conductor of the AI gravy train. When Sam Altman and the Sulzbergers fight though, as a normal person, my hope is that they destroy each other.

I think the winner are Chinese (and by extension OSS) models as they can ignore copyright. A net win, I think.

It's a part of privacy policy boilerplate that if a company is compelled by the courts to give up its logs it'll do it. I'm sure all of OpenAI's users read that policy before they started spilling their guts to a bot, right? Or at least had an LLM summarize it for them?

> This would allow them to access millions of user conversations that are unrelated to the case

It feels like the NYT is really fishing for inside information on how GPT is used so they can run statistical analysis and write articles about it. I.E. if they find examples of racism, they can get some great articles about how racism is rampant on GPT or something.

The original lawsuit has lots of examples of ChatGPT (3.5? 4?) regurgitating article...snippets. They could get a few paragraphs with ~80-90% perfect replication. But certainly not full articles, with full accuracy.

This wasn't solid enough for a summary judgement, and it seems the labs have largely figured out how to stop the models from doing this. So it looks like NYT wants to comb all user chats rather than pay a team of people tens of thousands a day to try an coax articles out of ChatGPT-5.

> having with OpenAI in private

I don't blieve that OpenAI, or any American corporation, has the wherewithal to actually maintain _your_ privacy in the face of _their_ profitability.

> typically you need to show some kind of harm.

You copied my material without my permission. I've been harmed. That right is independent of pricing. Otherwise Napster would never have generated legal cases.

> It's quite literally a fishing expedition.

It's why American courts are awesome.

Yeah, everyone else in the comments so far is acting emotionally, but --

As a fan and DAU of both OpenAI and the NYT, this is just a weird discovery demand and there should be another pathway for these two to move fwd in this case (NYT to get some semblance of understanding, OAI protecting end-user privacy).

To show harm they need the proof, this is the point of the lawsuit. They have sufficient evidence that OpenAI was scraping the web and the NY Times.

When Altman says "They claim they might find examples of you using ChatGPT to try to get around their paywall." he is blatantly misrepresenting the case.

https://smithhopen.com/2025/07/17/nyt-v-openai-microsoft-ai-...

"The lawsuit focuses on using copyrighted material for AI training. The NYT says OpenAI and Microsoft copied vast amounts of its content. They did this to build generative AI tools. These tools can output near-exact copies of NYT articles. Therefore, the NYT argues this breaks copyright laws. It also hurts journalism by skipping paywalls and cutting traffic to original sites. The complaint shows examples where ChatGPT mimics NYT stories closely. This could lead to money loss and harm from AI errors, called hallucinations."

This has nothing to do with the users, it has everything to do with OpenAI profiting off of pirated copyrighted material.

Also, Altmans is getting scared because the NY Times proved to the judge that CahtGPT copied many articles:

"2025 brings big steps in the case. On March 26, 2025, Judge Sidney Stein rejected most of OpenAI’s dismissal motion. This lets the NYT’s main copyright claims go ahead. The judge pointed to “many” examples of ChatGPT copying NYT articles. He found them enough to continue. This ruling dropped some side claims, like unfair competition. But it kept direct and contributory infringement, plus DMCA breaches."

>But conversations people thought they were having with OpenAI in private

...had never been private in the first place.

not only is the data used for refining the models, OpenAI had also shariah policed plenty of people for generating erotica.

100% agreed. In the time you wrote this, I also posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45901054

I felt quite some disappointment with the comments I saw on the thread at that time.

> Finally, both parties should find a neutral third party.

That's next to impossible. And if that party fails to be neutral you've just generated a new lawsuit entangled with this one.

The current procedure is each side gets their own expert. The two expert can duke it out and the crucible of the courtroom decides who was more credible.

Two orgs helmed by supporters of authoritarianism (to put it nicely):

let them fight.

Its clearly propaganda. "Your data belongs to you." I'm sure the ToS says otherwise, as OpenAI likely owns and utilizes this data. Yes, they say they are working on end-to-end encryption (whatever that means when they control one end), but that is just a proposal at this point.

Also their framing of the NYT intent makes me strongly distrust anything they say. Sit down with a third party interviewer who asks challenging questions, and I'll pay attention.

I got one sentence in and thought to myself, "This is about discovery, isn't it?"

And lo, complaints about plaintiffs started before I even had to scroll. If this company hadn't willy-nilly done everything they could to vacuum up the world's data, wherever it may be, however it may have been protected, then maybe they wouldn't be in this predicament.

Ironically there is precedent of Google caring more about this. When they realized location timeline was a gigantic fed honeypot, they made it per-device, locally stored only. No open letters were written in the process of.

Honestly the sooner OpenAI goes bankrupt the better. Just a totally corrupt firm.

>With each query to the model the full conversation is fed into the model again, so I guess there is no technical need to store them unencrypted.

I am pretty sure this isn't true. They have to have some sort of K-V cache system to make continuing conversations cheaper.

Encryption that you have the keys to won't save you from a court order

1-5: not a concern

It'll be the lawyers who need to go through the data, and given the scale of it, they won't be able to do anything more than trawl for the evidence they need and find specific examples to cite. They don't give a shit if you're asking chatgpt how to put a hit out on your ex, and they're not there to editorialize.

I wont pretend to guess* how they'll perform the discovery, but I highly doubt it will result in humans reading more than a handful of the records in total outside of the ones found via whatever method they automate the discovery process.

If there's top secret information in there, and it was somehow stumbled upon by one of these lawyers or a paralegal somewhere, I find it impossibly unlikely they'd be stupid enough to do anything other than run directly to whomever is the rightful possessor of said information and say "hey we found this in this place it shouldn't be" and then let them deal with it. Which is what we'd want them to do.

*Though if I had to speculate on how they'd do it, I do think the funniest way would be to feed the records back into chatgpt and ask it to point out all the times the records show evidence of infringement

> 5. Top secret information

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers

1. That sounds useful.

2. That sounds useful.

3. That sounds useful.

4. That sounds useful.

5. That sounds useful.

Are these supposed to be examples of things that shouldn't be found out about? This has to be the worst pro-privacy argument I've ever seen on the internet. "Privacy is good because they will find out about our crimes"

By the same token, why isn't NYT proposing something like that rather than the world's largest random sampling?

You don't have to think that OpenAI is good to think there's a legitimate issue over exposing data to a third party for discovery. One could see the Times discovering something in private conversations outside the scope of the case, but through their own interpretation of journalistic necessity, believe it's something they're obligated to publish.

Part of OpenAI holding up their side of the bargain on user data, to the extent they do, is that they don't roll over like a beaten dog to accommodate unconditional discovery requests.

> Theoretically, they could prove their tools aren’t being used to doing anything wrong

That is proving a negative. You are never required to prove a negative.

> the only problem is breaking the ridiculous walled garden that stops the courts from ‘knowing’ it.

The "problem" of privacy?

- any corporation

remember a corporation generally is an object owned by some people. Do you trust "unspecified future group of people" with your privacy? You can't. Best we can do is understand the information architecture and act accordingly.

> Trust, security, and privacy guide every product and decision we make except ones that involve money.

-- openai, probably.

You know you have a branding problem when (1) you have to say that at the outset, and (2) it induces more eyerolls than a gaggle of golf dads.

Stopped reading at this line

Standard tech scaling playbook, page 69420: there is a function f(x) whereby if you're growing fast enough, you can ignore the laws, then buy the regulators. This is called "The Uber Curve"

They didn't keep temporary chats. They were ordered to keep those as part of this case.

it is dramatically determined by the state and the judge

Of course this principle applies to Gmail too, if you’re willing to accept the absurdity. I could copy-paste copyrighted NYT snippets into emails and send them to everyone I know. Under the same logic, the NYT would be entitled to have access to everyone's Gmail account in order to verify who's sending what and get compensated if anyone is infringing their copyright.

That’s not justice. That’s legal extortion.

I get that people are angry at OpenAI. But let’s not confuse outrage over one company with support for broken systems. Patent and copyright trolls thrive when we normalize overreach, whether it’s AI training data or email threads. If we let corporations weaponize IP law to control every digital whisper, we’re not protecting creators, we’re burying free expression under a mountain of lawsuits.

But that vault can contain conversation between me and chatgpt, which I willingly did, but with the expectation that only openai has access to it. Why should some lawyer working for NYT have access to it? OpenAI is precisely correct, no matter what other motives could be there.

OpenAI would/could say the data is biased (maybe even purposefully).

> giving a corporation infamous for promoting authoritarianism

The NYT is certainly open to criticism along many fronts, but I don't have the slightest idea what you mean in claiming it promotes authoritarianism.

I'll bet you're right in some cases. I don't think that it is as pervasive as it has been made out to be though, but the argument requires some framing and current rules, regulation, and laws aren't tuned to make legal sense of this. (This is a little tangential, because the complaint seems to be about getting ChatGPT to reproduce content verbatim to a third party.)

There are two things I think about:

First, and generally, an AI ought to be able to ingest content like news articles because it's beneficial for users of AI. I would like to question an AI about current events.

Secondly, however, the legal mechanism by which it does that isn't clear. I think it would be helpful if these outlets would provide the information as long as the AI won't reproduce the content verbatim. If that does not happen, then another framing might liken the AI ingestion as an individual going to the library to read the paper. In that case, we don't require the individual to retroactively pay for the experience or unlearn what he may have learned while at the library.

> infamous for promoting authoritarianism

what are you referencing here?

Well the court disagrees with you and found that this is evidence that the NYT needs to prove its case. No surprise, considering its direct evidence of exactly what OpenAI is claiming in its defense...

I suspect that many of those comments are from the Philosopher's Chair (aka bathroom), and are not aspiring to be literal answers but are ways of saying "OpenAI Bad". But to your point there should be privacy preserving ways to comply, like user anonymization, tailored searches and so on. It sounds like the NYT is proposing a random sampling of user data. But couldn't they instead do a random sampling of their most widely read articles, for positive hits, rather than reviewing content on a case by case basis?

> The tech community has largely stood against this kind of thing when it's been invasive scanning of private messages, tracking user data

The tech community has been doing the scanning and tracking.

OpenAI is the one who chose to store the information. Nobody twisted their arm to do so.

If you store data it can come up in discovery during lawsuits and criminal cases. Period.

E.g., storing illegal materials on Google Drive, Google WILL turn that over to the authorities if there’s a warrant or lawsuit that demands it in discovery.

E.g., my CEO writes an email telling the CFO that he doesn’t want to issue a safety recall because it’ll cost too much money. If I sue the company for injuring me through a product they know to be defective, that civil suit subpoena can ask for all emails discussing the matter and there’s no magical wall of privacy where the company can just say “no that’s private information.”

At the same time, I don’t get to trawl through the company’s emails and use some email the CEO flirting with their secretary as admissible evidence.

There are many ways the court is able to ensure privacy for the individuals. Sexual assault victims don’t have their evidence blasted across the the airwaves just because the court needs to examine that physical evidence.

The only way to avoid this is to not collect the data in the first place, which is where end to end encryption with user-controlled keys or simply not collecting information comes into play.

> In direct contrast: I fully agree with OpenAI here. We can have a more nuanced opinion than 'piracy to train AI is bad therefore refusing to share chats is bad', which sounds absurd but is genuinely how one of the other comments follows logic.

These chats only need to be shared because:

- OpenAI pirated masses of content in the first place

- OpenAI refuse to own up to it even now (they spin the NYT claims as "baseless").

I don't agree with them giving my chats out either, but the blame is not with the NYT in my opinion.

> We don't have to support OpenAI's actions in order to oppose the NYT's actions.

Well the NYT action is more than just its own. It will set a precedent if they win which means other news outlets can get money from OpenAI as well. Which makes a lot of sense, after all they have billions to invest in hardware, why not in content??

And what alternative do they have? Without OpenAI giving access to the source materials used (I assume this was already asked for because it is the most obvious route) there is not much else they can do. And OpenAI won't do that because it will prove the NYT point and will cause them to have to pay a lot to half the world.

It's important that this case is made, not just for the NYT but for journalism in general.

I generally agree, but publicizing the data is only a small part of the risk. The NYT could use the data for journalism research, then perform parallel construction of it for the public news article:

For example, if they find Mayor X asking ChatGPT about fraud, porn, DUI, cancer diagnoses, murder, etc. - maybe even mentioning names, places, etc. - they could then investigate that issue, find other evidence, and publish that.

No, because OpenAI can change their server at any time - and does, to patch over the cases where their copyright infringement is obvious.

> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

The constitution is clear that the purpose of intellectual property is to promote progress. I feel that OpenAI is on the right side of that and this is not IP theft as long as they aren't reproducing others work in a non-transformative way.

Training the AI is clearly transformative (and lossy to boot). Giving the AI the ability to scrape and paraphrase others work is less clear and both sides each have valid arguments. I don't envy the judges that must make that call.

It's more like a torrent tracker telling users that a newspaper wants to know what people are torrenting because they "claim" people are torrenting the newspaper, but investigating this would be an invasion of privacy of the users of the torrent tracker.

This isn't even a hyperbole. It's literally the same thing.

It's common and trivial to identify you by other means.

Agree. Everyone would be singing a different tune if say, Fox News were asking for this.

>I don't want NYT or anyone else to see my conversations

Except for OpenAI, apparently.

Why it is absurd? Conversation between me and ChatGPT can be read by a lawyer working for NYT, and that is what is absurd.

Yeah, I'm not sure why everyone feels the need to take a side here. Both of these organizations are ghoulish.