Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Alphabet’s Gemini may be great for helping with research or creating spreadsheets, but one thing they decidedly are not is your attorney. If anything, turning to artificial intelligence for legal advice can wind up backfiring, as it did for a white collar criminal defendant in New York who tried to shield from federal prosecutors his communications with Claude–the ones where he asked it for a legal defense strategy.

It seems obvious that you shouldn’t rely on artificial intelligence for legal advice, particularly if something important, like your freedom or a lot of money, is at stake. What’s new is that even discussing legal matters with your favorite chatbot could be risky.

In February, U.S. District Court Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the Southern District of New York ruled that AI’s large language models are not attorneys, and any communications with them can be used against criminal defendants just like any other non-privileged documents. The judge noted in his decision that his ruling “appears to answer a question of first impression nationwide”—meaning no other courts in the U.S. have ruled on this issue. His conclusion on privilege would presumably apply to civil litigation too.

The privilege question arose in a criminal securities fraud case against Texas businessman Bradley Heppner, the former chairman and CEO of publicly-traded GWG Holdings, who was charged with defrauding investors out of more than $150 million.........

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