AI Reality Check: Unexpected Risk: Chatbots with Memory

Learn more about how to leverage these automatic assistants in a way that safeguards your important data.

AI chatbot - Artificial Intelligence digital OpenAI has recently introduced a new feature: Your ChatGPT account will remember what you have done in the past and use that information to give you better prompting results. Google does something similar and includes your search results.

While the improved quality this feature will provide is good news, what is potentially not so good is when team members use their private chatbot accounts for work. Sensitive and/or contractually restricted information, like contract documents, are uploaded and saved in memory. While this isn’t a huge risk if the person stays, it opens unexpected risks if they leave or even if a consultant or temporary worker, like an intern, uses their chatbots for company work.

For the near term, there is an easy fix—ask that anyone using personal chatbots turn on “Temporary Chat” for all queries or work done with company information. This might also be a good practice to consider for company-managed chatbot accounts.

Apr 23, 2025 — Member Update

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