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When you delete your old conversations on ChatGPT, the logs will now be gone for good.
Earlier this year, OpenAI was forced to retain users’ deleted logs as part of its ongoing multibillion-dollar copyright lawsuit with The New York Times and other news organizations. As Ars Technica reports, the preservation order from the US District Court for the Southern District of New York was put in place because deleted chats were thought to possibly contain evidence of users prompting ChatGPT to generate copyrighted news articles.
The order impacted hundreds of millions of ChatGPT Free, Plus, Pro, and Team users, as well as users of OpenAI’s application programming interface (API). It did not impact ChatGPT Enterprise or ChatGPT Edu customers or those with a Zero Data Retention agreement as part of their API use.
The issue had caused outcry from some within the ChatGPT user community, and OpenAI’s lawyers accused the NYT’s lawyers of “overreach” for issuing the demands, saying that it “fundamentally conflicts with the privacy commitments” it made to its users. Meanwhile, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called the NYT’s data request “unconscionable” in a post on X.
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But earlier this week, US Magistrate Judge Ona Wang approved a joint order to axe the preservation order. However, all of the deletions that had already been saved under the order will still be accessible to the NYT’s lawyers as evidence.
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Even if you can now delete your chats from ChatGPT logs permanently, it’s probably still not a great idea to share your darkest secrets with the tool. Earlier this year, Altman warned that your ChatGPT conversations aren’t legally protected and could be presented in court during lawsuits.
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, PCMag’s parent company, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April 2025, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.
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I’m a reporter covering weekend news. Before joining PCMag in 2024, I picked up bylines in BBC News, The Guardian, The Times of London, The Daily Beast, Vice, Slate, Fast Company, The Evening Standard, The i, TechRadar, and Decrypt Media.
I’ve been a PC gamer since you had to install games from multiple CD-ROMs by hand. As a reporter, I’m passionate about the intersection of tech and human lives. I’ve covered everything from crypto scandals to the art world, as well as conspiracy theories, UK politics, and Russia and foreign affairs.
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