Before you ask your AI that next question...

In United States v. Heppner (February 2026), Judge Jed Rakoff of the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York (a U.S. federal court) ruled that a defendant’s chats with a public AI tool (in this case Anthropic’s Claude) are not protected by attorney-client privilege or work-product doctrine. The ruling holds that using consumer AI with privileged information waives that privilege because there is no reasonable expectation of confidentiality, and that an AI is not a lawyer.

Bradley Heppner, a Dallas-based financial services executive, was charged with securities and wire fraud. After learning that he was the target of a government investigation, and after retaining counsel, Heppner himself used a publicly available AI platform to research legal issues related to the investigation.

Acting on his own, Heppner entered information regarding his case, including some that originated with his paid legal counsel. Using these inputs, he ran queries related to the investigation, which yielded several responses that he saved as documents. He later transmitted those documents to his defense counsel prior to his arrest to facilitate discussions about their contents.

Upon his arrest, U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation agents seized electronic devices that contained those documents. Heppner’s defense counsel asserted attorney-client privilege and work-product protection over those saved documents and provided a privilege log to the government.

A privilege log is a document produced during the discovery phase of a lawsuit that lists materials withheld from the opposing party due to legal privilege, such as attorney-client communications or work-product doctrine. It enables opposing counsel and the court to assess the validity of the privilege claim without revealing the confidential information itself.

The work-product doctrine protects materials prepared by an attorney in anticipation of litigation, such as witness interviews, notes, and legal strategies, which are often protected from discovery.

After reviewing the privilege log, the government disagreed and moved for a ruling that the attorney-client privilege and work doctrine protections did not apply. The court held that those documents were not protected by either the attorney-client privilege or the work product doctrine.

In that ruling, the court found that because the AI platform is not an attorney, the communications were not between a client and his lawyer.

Later in that ruling, the court found no reasonable expectation of confidentiality. The court emphasized that the AI platform’s privacy policy informed users that information entered into the platform could be used for training and disclosed to third parties, including government agencies.