Asking ChatGPT About Your Case? Those Chats Aren’t Private

It’s late. The letter from the insurance company or the district attorney is on the kitchen table, and the chatbot on your phone is right there. It answers at 2 a.m., and it sounds like it knows what it’s talking about. So you type in what happened and ask what you should do.

A federal judge in New York has now said what a lot of lawyers suspected. Those chats aren’t private, and the other side can end up reading them.

What happened in the Heppner case

Bradley Heppner was a corporate executive charged with securities fraud and wire fraud in federal court in Manhattan. After he got a grand jury subpoena and knew he was the target, and before he was indicted, he used a publicly available version of Claude, an AI program, to work through his situation. He laid out the facts, what the government might charge, and what he might argue back. Some of what he typed in came from his own lawyers. He did it on his own, and afterward he sent the results to those lawyers.

When he was arrested, FBI agents searched his house with a warrant and took his documents and devices. Among them were about thirty-one documents from those AI conversations. His lawyers said the documents were privileged. In February 2026, Judge Jed Rakoff ruled they were not, and the government could look at them.

Why the judge said no

The attorney-client privilege protects confidential conversations between you and your lawyer. An AI program isn’t a lawyer. The judge also pointed to the company’s own privacy policy, which said it collects what users type in and what the program answers, can use that to train the program, and can share it with third parties, including government regulators. A conversation the company has told you it may hand over isn’t confidential.

Sending the chats to his lawyers afterward didn’t fix it. In the judge’s words, “non-privileged communications are not somehow alchemically changed into privileged ones upon being shared with counsel.”

What worries me most is a footnote. The judge said that by typing information from his lawyers into the program, Heppner gave up the privilege on that information too, the same as if he had shared it with any other outsider. A client who pastes my letter into a chatbot to have it explained may have given up the protection on my advice, not just on the chat.

Heppner also argued the chats were work product, the protection for material prepared for a case. The judge disagreed, because no lawyer asked him to do it and the documents didn’t reflect his lawyers’ strategy when he made them.

Other courts have gone the other way, up to a point

This isn’t settled. Since February, several courts have protected AI chats. A federal court in Michigan refused to order a woman representing herself in a lawsuit against a company to turn over her ChatGPT materials, calling AI programs “tools, not persons.” A federal court in Colorado protected a self-represented plaintiff’s AI work the same way. The Texas Business Court protected ChatGPT conversations in a business lawsuit, though it ordered some pages turned over, and a state court on Long Island threw out a subpoena to OpenAI for a self-represented defendant’s chats.

Most of the people protected were representing themselves, so they were their own lawyers when they used the program. What they got is work product protection, which a court can sometimes override, and it covered material made for the lawsuit. Even the Colorado court made the plaintiff tell the other side which AI program he had used with the company’s confidential documents, and it barred putting those documents into mainstream programs like standard ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. None of these courts held that a person’s chats with AI are covered by the attorney-client privilege.

And Heppner is the case that looks most like my clients: a man who already had lawyers and went to the chatbot on his own anyway.

What this means in Oklahoma

I’m not aware of an Oklahoma court that has ruled on this yet. Our privilege statute protects confidential communications with your lawyer, and it says a person who voluntarily discloses a significant part of a privileged communication waives the privilege. Oklahoma’s civil discovery rules protect material a party prepares for a lawsuit, which gives a client in a civil case something to argue. In a criminal case, the statute protects the work of the attorney and the attorney’s staff, which is closer to how the judge in Heppner saw it.

None of that helps if the police take your phone. Heppner’s chats came in on a search warrant, not a discovery request. The chats also sit with the AI company, and the other side can try to subpoena them from the company, the way the plaintiffs in the Long Island case did.

What to do instead

• Don’t type the facts of your case into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot or any other chatbot. That includes asking it what your case is worth or what you should say.

• Don’t paste our letters or emails into one to have them explained or summarized. Call and ask us instead.

• Don’t upload documents from your case, including anything the other side gave you. Some of them may be covered by a court order limiting who can see them.

• If you have already done any of this, don’t delete anything. Once a case is coming, deleting can look like destroying evidence, which is a bigger problem than the chats. Tell us which program you used and roughly when, and we will deal with it.

• When you fill out our case inquiry form, write it in your own words. Rough is fine. We would rather read three plain sentences from you than a polished page from a program.

A chatbot can be handy for a lot of things. Your case isn’t one of them. If you have questions about what is happening to you, call (918) 221-6190 or request a consultation. The first consultation is free, and you will talk with me directly.

Related: Tulsa criminal defense attorney. Oklahoma civil rights attorney. Tulsa personal injury lawyer. “We Just Want to Ask a Few Questions”: Why You Shouldn’t Talk to Police Without a Lawyer.

This article is general information, not legal advice for your situation.