Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

>OpenAI declined to comment on its decision not to share desired logs with Adams’ family, the lawsuit said. It seems inconsistent with the stance that OpenAI took last month in a case where the AI firm accused the family of hiding “the full picture” of their son’s ChatGPT conversations, which OpenAI claimed exonerated the chatbot.

>[...]

>This inconsistency suggests that ultimately, OpenAI controls data after a user’s death, which could impact outcomes of wrongful death suits if certain chats are withheld or exposed at OpenAI’s discretion.

Isn't arstechnica jumping the gun here? The Adams' family's lawsuit was filed December 11, 2025, and it's hasn't even been a month, even less if you don't count the christmas break. In the other case where they "exposed" another user's chat, OpenAI only did so as part of their response to the complaint, a month after the initial complaint was filed.

Not to mention that it's dubious whether Open AI should even turn over chat records to someone's estate upon their death without a court order. If I had my browser history synced with google, and I died, is that fair game for the estate lawyer to trawl through?

>If I had my browser history synced with google, and I died, is that fair game for the estate lawyer to trawl through?

Yes. Your estate controls just about everything you used to.

Want to avoid this? You could maybe write it in your will.

> Allegedly, “OpenAI knows what ChatGPT said to Stein-Erik about his mother in the days and hours before and after he killed her but won’t share that critical information with the Court or the public.”

We don't know the details, but an allegation about coverting up information about is a serious allegation.

Claiming Arstechnica is jumping the gun is pretty generous to them. They are deliberately lying. OpenAI's default policy is not to share user data without a subpoena. This is standard; every company does this. No reasonable person would position this as "selectively hiding" data. Yet that is exactly how the propagandists at Arstechnica described OpenAI in their headline.

> OpenAI's default policy is not to share user data without a subpoena.

As noted in the article, the plaintiffs assert that OpenAI's terms of service state the content belongs to the user, and now it belongs to the user's estate.

So it's not (yet) a question of subpoenas, but about that contract.

Their TOS says the copyright belongs to the user. But I don't see anything in the TOS saying that OpenAI is committed to delivering a copy of the data to the users estate.

True, but it does constrain what justification OpenAI may (credibly) put forward as it navigates in the paired realms of legality and public-relations. AFAIK there's still a lot of temporizing "we are reviewing this" from the company, but that probably can't last forever.

In other words, it makes a difference for OpenAI in deciding between choices such as "we'd love to help but legally can't" or "we could but we won't because we don't want to."

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