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ARTICLE · 24 NOVEMBER 2025

Your ChatGPT Chats Are About To Become Evidence: Why "Anonymization" Won't Save You

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Remember that time you asked ChatGPT to review your company's litigation strategy? Or when your HR team used it to draft termination letters?

United StatesTechnology
Andrew R. Lee
Andrew R. Lee
Graham H. Ryan
Graham H. Ryan
Jason Loring
Jason Loring

Remember that time you asked ChatGPT to review your company's litigation strategy? Or when your HR team used it to draft termination letters? Those conversations, along with 20 million others, just became fair game in a lawsuit that your company has nothing to do with.

Earlier this month, US Magistrate Judge Ona Wang of the Southern District of New York ordered OpenAI to hand over 20 million ChatGPT conversations to lawyers representing The New York Times and other publishers seeking these conversations to support copyright infringement claims. The magistrate judge dismissed OpenAI's privacy concerns, apparently convinced that "anonymization" is the solution. While the court indicated it was attempting to balance discovery needs with privacy protection, its order reveals how challenging it is to apply traditional legal frameworks to AI-generated data.

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