OpenAI Appeals Court Order Requiring Retention of Consumer Data

OpenAI has appealed a court order that requires it to retain consumer ChatGPT and API data indefinitely, saying the order conflicts with its privacy commitments.

The order came in response to a demand from The New York Times and other plaintiffs in a lawsuit they brought against the artificial intelligence (AI) company, because they believe the data might support their case, OpenAI said in a Thursday (June 5) blog post.

“This fundamentally conflicts with the privacy commitments we have made to our users,” OpenAI Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap said in the post. “It abandons long-standing privacy norms and weakens privacy protections.”

Lightcap added that OpenAI believes the order is “an overreach” by The New York Times and that the company is appealing the order.

Reached by PYMNTS, The New York Times declined to comment on the blog post.

The order came in The New York Times’ copyright case against OpenAI and Microsoft, Reuters reported Thursday. The publisher filed the suit in 2023, alleging that the companies used its articles without permission to train their AI models.

The order requires the company to preserve ChatGPT output data indefinitely, according to the report.

OpenAI appealed the order Tuesday (June 3), the report said, citing a court filing.

According to OpenAI’s Thursday blog post, the company’s data retention policies vary by the type of account but generally include permanent removal of deleted chats within 30 days, unless legal or security reasons require it to do otherwise.

For business customers using Zero Data Retention endpoints, inputs and outputs are not retained. This is not impacted by the court order, the post said.

Under the court order, deleted chats that would normally be removed from OpenAI’s systems will instead be retained and stored in a secure system, protected under legal hold and accessible only when required to meet legal obligations, per the post.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a Thursday post on X: “We have been thinking recently about the need for something like ‘AI privilege’; this really accelerates the need to have the conversation. [In my opinion] talking to an AI should be like talking to a lawyer or doctor. I hope society will figure this out soon.”

In another post, Altman said: “(maybe spousal privilege is a better analogy).”

When The New York Times filed its lawsuit alleging copyright infringement in December 2023, the newspaper said in an article that the suit accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of “using the Times’s content without payment to create products that substitute for The Times and steal audiences away from it.”