Originally published January 6, 2026; updated July 9, 2026 A side controversy in the OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation case going on in federal court in New York City has been that regular users’ ChatGPT conversations were ordered disclosed to the plaintiffs for searching and perhaps other litigation-related uses. This notion first caused quite a stir with ChatGPT users commenting on Reddit, for example, when Judge Wang, the magistrate judge overseeing “discovery,” which is the exchange of documents and information between the litigating parties, back in mid 2025 ordered all ChatGPT conversation transcripts or “output logs” be preserved by defendant OpenAI. Then in November 2025 Judge Wang ordered that 20 million (down from an original requested 120 million) of these user conversation logs be made available by OpenAI in a “de-identified” format for the plaintiffs to perform keyword searches on. To quote the court, a user conversation is “de-identified” “by removing both personally identifiable information and other private information from the [conversation log] using ‘OpenAI’s custom de-identification tool’.” OpenAI fought Judge Wang’s order, but Judge Stein, the case’s presiding judge at the time, backed her, and the 20 million conversation logs were made available for keyword searching. (Judge Stein retired from the bench at the beginning of 2026 but stayed on for a while to settle then-existing disputes in the litigation.) What Judge Wang ordered OpenAI to do is far from publicly releasing the conversations, and the plaintiffs are restricted to using the searches and search results for litigation-related purposes. Plus, the conversation logs are being “de-identified,” though we don’t really know precisely how OpenAI’s custom “de-identification” tool works or how much it laundered the users’ chat transcripts. Still, this production was another cramp to those who thought their chatbot conversations would be permanently private and sacrosanct. (Of course, in the meantime courts have ruled that no conversations with a public, retail chatbot carry any expectation of privacy anyway. See my explanatory posts here and here .) UPDATE: The 20 million conversation logs were made available to plaintiffs on December 15, 2025 for keywork searching. However, the issue did not end there. After reviewing the produced chatbot conversations and talking with OpenAI’s personnel, the plaintiffs were quite unhappy. The plaintiffs allege that OpenAI, even before the production, failed to retain large numbers of ChatGPT conversations, including some of the conversations generated through ChatGPT’s “Temporary Chat” feature. Even in the 20 million conversation logs that were produced, the plaintiffs allege OpenAI underrepresented the sample of conversations that use Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), and also applied 19 billion redactions to the logs, suggesting 1,000 redactions per log. On July 9, 2026 certain of the plaintiffs requested the court to sanction (penalize) OpenAI for the alleged wrongful conduct relating to the conversation logs and other items. They requested the court grant them a number of remedies: Prohibit OpenAI from using any of the 20 million produced conversation logs for OpenAI’s defense Find as a definite fact in advance that the plaintiffs’ copyrighted materials were “substantial[ly] and systematic[ally]” tapped by and fed to users through ChatGPT conversations, which is what the plaintiffs were trying to use the produced conversation logs to prove Openly inform the jury at the trial that OpenAI deleted billions of conversations Make OpenAI pay the plaintiffs for the attorneys’ fees and costs the plaintiffs incurred because of OpenAI’s allegedly wrongful conduct and expended in fighting that conduct and litigating the request for sanctions (penalties) The plaintiffs’ request for penalties can be found here . The plaintiffs’ request for penalties will now be briefed in response by OpenAI and in a few months presented to Magistrate Judge Wang for a decision. However, these sorts of “discovery” requests are not always acted on immediately but instead are sometimes, even often, “kicked down the road” toward the time of trial, which is still quite far off in this case. I will keep you posted! TLDR: In the big New York federal copyright litigation, OpenAI seven months ago released 20 million “de-identified” ChatGPT user conversation logs to the plaintiffs for searching, but the plaintiffs allege massive redactions in those logs and other obstruction by OpenAI, and have moved the court to sanction (penalize) OpenAI for discovery misconduct.
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Originally posted by u/Apprehensive_Sky1950 on r/ArtificialInteligence