Can your AI-chat history be subpoenaed?
🚨 Major wake-up call for AI users 🚨
A federal court has ruled in United States v. Heppner (Feb 2026): Your chats with public generative AI (ChatGPT, etc.) are NOT protected by attorney-client privilege.
Why? You're sharing with a third party → no confidentiality. AI is not your lawyer.
The reasoning is straightforward. Privilege depends on confidentiality, and using a public Al tool involves sharing information with a third party.👀🤔
This position is consistent with the Australian position, that AI-Chats are even potentially breaching s 114Q of the Family Law Act (Cth) which is a prohibition on publishing Court information.
In a recent Australian Case (unpublished) a Judge held :
"The conduct of this appeal illustrates the challenges presented to the Court and litigants from
reliance on artificial intelligence, notwithstanding that it may present as offering expertise and
efficiency. The risk that entering documents into an AI program will result in a breach of
s 114Q of the Act (Mertz & Mertz (No 3) (2025) FLC 94-285) is outside the scope of this
appeal."
With FLAST-AI Private Server you are safe as any data is stored on your own server and AI chat history logs are disabled. However if you use the publicly available products like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Grok, those records are potentially subject to a subpoena application and/or a case against you for breaching s 114Q of the Family Law Act.
