They confided in ChatGPT. Their secrets ended up in court.

When a teenage boy identified in court filings as R.K.C. didn’t understand his father, he turned to ChatGPT for help.
“My dad Said that I’m will get a settlement worth of 1million dollar,” R.K.C. said to the chatbot in October 2024, according to court filings. “He said that If that doesn’t make me happy what does. What does he mean.”
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The millions of queries Americans pose to artificial intelligence chatbots each day generally stay between them and their AI interlocutors. But R.K.C.’s question and his other intimate conversations with ChatGPT were swept into the public record by defense attorneys responding to a lawsuit he filed in 2023 against Meta, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube. He argued in the case that the companies’ apps caused him to suffer years of social media addiction and mental health problems. By late July, R.K.C.’s attorneys had settled with Snap, TikTok and YouTube, and dropped his case against Meta, citing in part concerns about the boy’s ability to go through a “grueling weeks-long trial.” The companies have denied the teen’s allegations. Snapchat owner Snap declined to comment. Meta, TikTok and YouTube did not respond to a request for comment.
R.K.C. is one of a growing number of Americans who have had their private conversations with AI chatbots made public in court. As more people turn to AI for help with work, health issues and for companionship, chatbot operators have become custodians of a fast-growing trove of intimate data that can be sought by law enforcement, or companies or other opponents in civil litigation.
A Washington Post review of public records and local news stories found that chatbot logs were cited in 12 court cases over the past two years. It’s hard to know how often chatbot material is drawn into investigations and legal proceedings more broadly, because police, and parties in civil cases, don’t have to present in court all the evidence they obtain.
“A fifteen-year-old may type things into a chatbot that he may not say to a therapist, a parent, or a friend, and he does it without realizing that it could end up in a defense expert’s report,” Mike Morgan, a partner at Morgan & Morgan, one of the law firms that represented R.K.C., said in a statement. The teen’s ChatGPT logs had “no bearing” on how the case was resolved, Morgan said. R.K.C. will turn 16 at the end of August.