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\n Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images\n <\/p>\n
In 1998, government lawyer Stephen Houck made a novel argument<\/a>. Asked why the U.S. wasn\u2019t summoning Bill Gates to testify in its antitrust case against Microsoft, Houck said, \u201cBecause we have his email.\u201d The New York Times called it \u201cthe first major email trial,\u201d in which messages that were voluminous, discoverable, and \u201calive with ideas and competitive zeal, punctuated with profanity and exclamation points\u201d featured heavily. Soon, there were widespread official policies \u2014 not always heeded \u2014 about what could or should be said in messages written on the computer.<\/p>\n In 2005, a computer consultant was convicted of killing his wife after prosecutors presented a search history that included terms like \u201cneck,\u201d \u201csnap,\u201d and \u201cbreak.\u201d In the press, it was dubbed the \u201cGoogle Murder<\/a>\u201d \u2014\u00a0like the \u201cemail trial,\u201d a harbinger of countless legal proceedings and news stories that would surface digital communications that were mistaken for private.<\/p>\n Now, interactions with AI are finding their way into the public record. 404 Media reports<\/a>:<\/p>\n An expert witness testifying in a lawsuit about liability for a Houston explosion that killed three people and destroyed roughly 200 homes used ChatGPT to write significant portions of his \u201cexpert report.\u201d [His prompts] showed that he asked ChatGPT to help him \u201ccreate an exceptional expert witness report defending the standard of care at 3M,\u201d and that the report should \u201cshow how 3M is 0% at fault for the explosion at Watson Grinding.\u201d<\/p>\n Juicing an LLM for \u201cexpert testimony\u201d to defend a chemical company is an extreme example of a new phenomenon. But chatbot logs have been leaking into civil and criminal legal proceedings for a while now. In 2024, a Virginia man was convicted<\/a> of murder with the help of a chat transcript that captured his interactions with Snap\u2019s AI bot. (Snap\u2019s bot had told him that \u201cviolence is never the answer.\u201d) In 2025, it was revealed that the man accused of setting the Palisades Fire had asked<\/a> ChatGPT, \u201cAre you at fault if a fire is lift [sic] because of your cigarettes?\u201d In 2026, a Missouri teenager might have gotten away with vandalizing a bunch of cars at MSU had he not described his crime to ChatGPT and asked<\/a>, \u201cIs there any way they could know it was me?\u201d Chat logs have been used to incriminate AI companies themselves after their bots have been accused of encouraging crimes or self-harm.<\/p>\n More similar to the 3M example is a case in which the CEO of a South Korean video-game company was caught conspiring with ChatGPT to avoid paying out executives of an acquired firm before firing them. (The chat logs helped lead<\/a> to their eventual reinstatement.) Recovered chat logs have also become a feature of government inquiries<\/a> around the world: In the U.K., technology secretary Peter Kyle was revealed to have asked ChatGPT in 2025 to explain why AI adoption seemed slow in his country; in 2024, shortly before South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law, his head of security was using ChatGPT to learn about coups.<\/p>\n Should Democrats take control of the House in November, we can expect to hear a lot about our own government\u2019s use of AI, revealed in the form of presumed-to-be-private chat logs. (This, I\u2019ll bet, is how we\u2019ll learn a lot more<\/a> about DOGE.)<\/p>\n Email transferred a whole lot of previously written and spoken communication into a new, searchable, and recoverable format, followed, eventually, by workplace instant-messaging and collaboration apps. It also induced new sorts of communication that exploded in volume: mass emails, long threads and chains, summaries of meetings, etc. In contrast, nonsocial tools like search engines seemed to create an impression of privacy, leading people to confide incredibly intimate and potentially incriminating information into text boxes administered by companies like Google or by their employers, much of which could be reproduced in court or in public.<\/p>\n Chatbots are a fusion of the two and, in most cases, legally identical: a private text box that encourages extensive conversation, sycophantically holding users\u2019 hands as they talk themselves into future liability. You\u2019re led to believe you\u2019re talking to a little guy in the computer; in fact, as with most computer and smartphone interactions these days, you\u2019re also filing text into a searchable database. Add in the rise of AI-powered meeting transcription<\/a> and social surveillance<\/a>, and the range of materials generated in the course of a regular computer-job workday will soon be breathtaking. At the least, this should make future white-collar prosecutions a little easier \u2014 that is, if the government gets around to caring about those again<\/a>.<\/p>\n Sign Up for John Herrman column alerts<\/p>\n Get an email alert as soon as a new article publishes.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n