The artificial intelligence company OpenAI announced this week that free account users will now be able to access the memory feature in ChatGPT, allowing it to remember previous conversations in order to better respond to future queries. However, due to a new court ruling, OpenAI is now required to retain all user conversations, including those that were deleted.
The legal decision followed lawsuits filed by media organizations against OpenAI, including The New York Times, according to a report by the technology news website Mashable. In a ruling issued on May 13, 2025, U.S. Judge Ona T. Wang ordered OpenAI “to preserve and segregate all output log data that may otherwise be deleted in the future, on an ongoing basis from now until further order of the court.”
Although the ruling was issued several weeks ago, it only recently became public after OpenAI began the process of appealing the decision. According to ArsTechnica, a tech news site, the company is now requesting oral arguments to halt the enforcement of the judge’s order.
The plaintiffs—The New York Times and other news agencies—argue that OpenAI could delete ChatGPT records that might incriminate it, for example by showing that chat users are bypassing paywalls by asking ChatGPT to summarize articles. OpenAI, for its part, claims this is merely an assumption not supported by evidence.
If the judge’s ruling is enforced, ChatGPT users will need to assume that all their conversations with the chatbot are now being stored, raising serious privacy concerns for millions of people.