AI ruling prompts warnings from US lawyers: Your chats could be used against you

josefritzishere

Increasingly AI seems to be mostly downside. A legal chat bot without attorney-client privledge, also implies a medical chatbot may have no HIPAA protection. It renders the service unsafe and therefore unusable and maybe more importantly... unsalable.

another-dave

> Prosecutors argued that they had a right to demand material that Heppner created with Claude because his defense lawyers were not directly involved, and because attorney-client privilege does not apply to chatbots. > > Voluntarily revealing information from a lawyer to any third party can jeopardize the customary legal protections for those attorney communications. > > Manhattan-based U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff ruled, opens new tab in February that Heppner must hand over 31 documents generated by Anthropic's chatbot Claude related to the case. > > No attorney-client relationship exists "or could exist, between an AI user and a platform such as Claude," Rakoff wrote. If I hand wrote some notes in a notebook or diary, I wouldn't have to hand them over, as I understand it, even with no lawyer in the mix. Same if I wrote some notes in a text file on my computer. Leaving AI aside, what in particular makes this different from using any other cloud-based software? Does writing a Google Doc to gather my thoughts or a draft email in Gmail constituent "revealing information from a lawyer to a third party"? What if Google have enabled AI-features on these? Feels like this area really needs clarity for users rather than waiting for courts to rule on it.

segmondy

This is why you should have local models. The local models are good enough for private chats, they might not be as good as the cloud models for precise technical work, but for general sensitive chat you definitely should stick to local.

kstrauser

It would never occur to me that they couldn’t. From a legal POV, that sounds a lot like using your search history against you.

amelius

What if I let my claw bot chat online?

anthonyskipper

The obvious business opportunity here is for some lawyer to start running an AI service to do these kinds of things. Anyone who subscribes is a client of the lawyer, who owns the chatbot infrastructure, which would be protected under attorney client privilege.

deadbabe

Could there be something like a VPN for AI models? VPP? You send a prompt to a neutral third party who then sends it to an AI model and then routes the response back to you?

pvtmert

people point out in sibling comments that is phone call then be out of client-attorney privileges? since it goes through a "3rd party"? maybe not the call itself but the voicemail for example. can it be "extracted" for the same purpose? another point to make it safer would be sharing the "chat" with the lawyer, this way it becomes media of communication.

neya

Of all the words to use in the title, they chose "prompts" when talking about AI. Had to read it twice because, if you assume the AI "prompts" equivalent, the whole title becomes gibberish.

OutOfHere

Of course lawyers want you to give up your power; they don't want you looking up information that they charge $500 an hour to give you. Meanwhile, sensible people perform sensitive defense and prosecution related chats anonymously facilitated via local LLMs or cryptocurrency.

flufluflufluffy

This seems so obvious to me. Why would you ever put information regarding a legal case you’re party to into an AI chat

gdulli

An aspect of AI that's really underdiscussed is just the basic switch from doing all your searches logged out to now being forced to be logged in somewhere. That much alone is disqualifying for me.

kube-system

This seems plainly obvious -- chat bots are not attorneys. Why would they be privileged as such? You don't get attorney-client privilege when you put your legal questions into Google, or to sending them to anyone or anything else other than an attorney...

dlcarrier

tl;dr: privileged communications (see: https://law.usnews.com/law-firms/advice/articles/what-are-pr... ) are protected only when they are communications between privileged parties. Everything else is can be used against you in a court of law.

stainablesteel

sam altman commented on this topic before, and i think he's right we need some kind of user-chat privilege much like doctors and their patients, or lawyers and their clients

themafia

From the very beginning I've been extremely uneasy letting a corporation have access to my "chat like" interactions over a long period of time with their product. I think it's insanely foolish to use these tools in these configurations. If you must use AI you should be running it locally.

rbbydotdev

… and this is not okay right?

ValentineC

In before the immigration officials of some countries start asking for AI chat history, the same way they now ask for social media profiles. I don't want to give them ideas, but surely someone else would have thought of it after reading this article's headline.

cmiles74

It will become increasingly difficult to argue that a particular transcript between someone and Claude isn't accurate, once Anthropic finishes tying those transcripts to your official identification with Persona. Wild times!

robertkarljr

There's a few threads there where folks would benefit from reading Judge Rakoff's memo. There's a copy here, or it's on PACER/RECAP: https://www.akingump.com/a/web/ssTGsd5NHbtZ1onzXQMTye/1_25-c... For 1), his reasoning shows how intelligent, well-read humans view AI which is quite different from the attitudes seen on HN. Rakoff calls the chats "Claude searches" which while it may sound ridiculous (what is this, Perplexity?) is just how some people must view this crazy new thing: another Google. You type stuff in and get results out. 2) Rakoff goes through the 3 elements of attorney client privilege in US law (communications between attorney and client, intended to be and kept confidential, and for the purpose of legal advice). It's obvious the Claude chats fail two of them and he goes over why. 3) A lot of people bring up the point that if you use Google Docs to transcribe privileged information, is that the same, since you send your data to Google? The model AI companies take when they cater to legal clients is akin to that of a locked filing cabinet in a storage facility: sure, you're sending the data to them, but with a ZDR they ain't looking at it or training on it. Another CRITICAL point here not mentioned in the article is Warner v Gilbarco; Gilbarco directly contradicts Heppner and indicates that work-product doctrine covers AI-generated chats! https://perkinscoie.com/insights/update/heppner-and-gilbarco... The law is not settled. I looked into on-premises AI for legal as a business idea but decided it's not a great idea right now.