Are AI Chatbot Prompts Discoverable? Courts Say 'YES!'

Anyone faced with litigation risk should be prepared for the inevitable request for their employees' user prompts on either enterprise-licensed or individual user accounts on ChatGPT, Claude, or other AI chatbots. In fact, parties have already started making these requests in discovery. Although case law is limited, courts are analyzing requests for AI prompts under traditional discovery principles governing privilege and proportionality.

In May 2025, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California considered whether defendant Anthropic's request to plaintiffs in Concord Music Group, Inc. v. Anthropic PBC for prompts to and outputs from Claude were protected by the attorney work product doctrine. Anthropic requested that plaintiffs produce all prompts to Claude that plaintiffs input in their pre-suit investigation. Notably, plaintiffs produced 5,000 prompts and output pairs on which they relied in alleging that Anthropic engaged in copyright