Wall Street Journal – no paywall: “A federal judge in Manhattan ruled in February that when a criminal defendant used an AI chatbot to prepare for his legal defense, he waived attorney-client privilege. The prosecution can now read every word he typed and the answers he received. If this reasoning stands, the consequences will reach far beyond artificial intelligence. The defendant in U.S. v. Heppner wasn’t a rogue litigant trying to replace his lawyers with a chatbot. He was represented by counsel and had already received privileged communications from his defense attorneys. His lawyers confirmed that he used Anthropic’s Claude to organize and analyze that material in preparation for meetings with counsel. He then shared the AI’s outputs with his attorneys, who used them in developing their strategy. Judge Jed Rakoff held that the Claude transcripts were protected by neither the attorney-client privilege nor the work-product doctrine. The court’s reasoning: By typing information into an AI platform, the defendant “shared” it with a third party, and because Anthropic’s privacy policy permits data collection and potential further disclosure, no “reasonable expectation of confidentiality” existed. The judge’s error was straightforward: He treated an AI model like a person. Throughout his opinion, he refers to the software engaging in “communications” with the user. But AI isn’t a person; it is a computing process. It can’t be deposed, call the police or betray a confidence. The third-party disclosure rule exists because sharing information with a human being creates a risk that the human will further disseminate it. That risk doesn’t exist when the “third party” is a statistical model running on a server. Judge Rakoff considered, and dismissed, the obvious point that typing into an AI tool is no different from typing into a cloud-based software, such as Google Docs. His answer, that cloud computing “is not intrinsically privileged in any case,” is a non sequitur. The question isn’t whether Google Docs creates privilege. It’s whether Google Docs destroys it. No lawyer in America thinks drafting a confidential memo in Google Docs waives the privilege over its contents. Judge Rakoff’s opinion doesn’t explain why the same act in another application does. No court has ever gone this far. The American Bar Association concluded in 2017 that lawyers may use cloud computing without waiving privilege, provided they take reasonable security precautions. State bar authorities in New York, California and elsewhere have reached the same conclusion. The entire legal profession has operated on this understanding for more than a decade. Judge Rakoff’s opinion doesn’t cite, distinguish or acknowledge any of these authorities….”