The Delete button is a request, not a promise
From May through late September 2025, affected consumer ChatGPT and API data could be retained even after deletion. A court order in a copyright case to which the users were not parties required that data to be preserved. OpenAI opposed the order. The order still applied.
You have probably deleted a chat. Perhaps it contained your salary, a diagnosis or a draft you were not ready to share. You pressed Delete, the entry disappeared, and that seemed to settle it.
The entry disappeared. That part was true.
What happened
In May 2025, in New York Times v. OpenAI, a federal magistrate judge ordered OpenAI to preserve affected consumer ChatGPT and API content that would otherwise have been deleted. According to OpenAI, ChatGPT Enterprise, ChatGPT Edu and API customers using Zero Data Retention were not affected. OpenAI objected, calling the demand an intrusion into users’ privacy, and said it would appeal.
These were separate stages of the litigation: the earlier order concerned preservation, while the later orders concerned production in discovery of a de-identified 20-million-log sample. In its 22 October 2025 update, OpenAI said it was continuing to retain limited historical April–September 2025 data, locked down for a small, audited legal and security team, and that the data was not being handed over to anyone at that time. That describes OpenAI’s account as of the update date; it does not establish the data’s current status in October 2026. OpenAI also stressed that the vast majority of the requested records were unrelated to the allegations in the case. These are OpenAI’s statements, not a court finding.
What matters
You were not a party to the case. The Delete button looked the same throughout, because that button on someone else’s server is a request to a system governed by other people, including courts.
This is not about one company. Any provider that stores your conversations may be required to preserve them, and providers’ terms usually make deletion subject to legal obligations. The useful question, then, is not which provider to trust, but where your work lives and what you send.
What APTAKE does
APTAKE stores your projects, chats, notes and files on your device. There is no APTAKE account or server of ours holding your projects, so we have no copy of your work to preserve or hand over. You connect your own API key and pay the provider directly. Before each request, you can review what will be sent and keep items out by marking them Private.
On your phone, delete means delete. APTAKE removes the local copy it controls.