StudioLessons from the 2025 OpenAI preservation order: if your agents call a public LLM, "delete" isn't fully in your control
Original title: If your AI agents call a public LLM, “delete” isn’t fully in your control: lessons from the 2025 OpenAI preservation order
The author revisits the May 2025 federal magistrate order in the New York Times copyright case requiring OpenAI to preserve output logs including user-deleted chats and Temporary Chats. The blanket order ended September 26, 2025, and in January 2026 a judge affirmed production of a sample of 20 million de-identified logs. The article argues that agents touch more data than a chat window and send it to a public LLM on every call, so a provider under legal hold can retain that data regardless of developer intent; some teams therefore run agents on private models in VPCs or on-premise, though logs, memory stores, and backups still need managing. The author discloses a bias from working in enterprise AI agents and private deployment.
The author draws on the 2025 OpenAI preservation order to highlight an often-overlooked design constraint: retention of data sent to a public LLM is out of builders' hands.
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