Comment by pclmulqdq
9 hours ago
If OpenAI truly didn't keep conversation records for any length of time, they would not be subject to this kind of order. Lots of stateless services get these and are able to defeat them because they never store the user's data. The fact that they store them at all means that they are in scope for a preservation order. It also means that they are in scope for all manner of usage by OpenAI themselves even if a user requests deletion.
It seems as if the court has forced OpenAI into collecting logs that they weren't otherwise collecting, or that they were deleting at user request.
So in this case not keeping logs as ordered by the court would be contempt of court.
Respectfully, it doesn’t matter the way it “seems,” it matters what is. They were collecting these logs, and as soon as they got the preservation order, they disabled deletion functionality and notified their customers of that.
There is a separate higher-tier private API customers can pay for that never had logging enabled, and the court did not force the company to add it.