Everyday AI

Is what I tell ChatGPT or Claude about my legal problem confidential, like talking to a lawyer?

No. In United States v. Heppner, a New York federal judge ruled in February 2026 that a fraud defendant's chats with the public version of Claude were not privileged: Claude is not a lawyer, he used it on his own rather than at his lawyers' direction, and its privacy policy gave him no reasonable expectation of confidentiality. The FBI had seized about 31 documents recording those chats. Sam Altman made the same point about ChatGPT in 2025: there is no legal confidentiality for those conversations. Use AI to understand terms and prepare your questions, but tell the facts of a dispute, a police matter or a divorce to your advocate, not to a chatbot, and assume anything you type could one day be read out in court.

On the AI map, 29 October 2026 AI assistants AI browsers Avatars and voice

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