Palisades Fire suspect's ChatGPT history to be used as evidence
59 comments
·October 8, 2025jampa
jimmySixDOF
Also why the sudden interest? Amazon Alexa snips have been used before in court/investigation and this is not new. But makes me wonder about what happens when you are dealing with summaries of summaries of long gone tokens. Is that evidence?
ccppurcell
Ok. But this serves as a reminder not to expect privacy when sending messages back and forth to some software company.
irjustin
Nothing new here. Somehow people are surprised evidence against them includes - "my google search" or "my chatgpt logs" or ...
quuxplusone
Hmm. The Rolling Stone article (and linked press conference) has the police giving a vastly different account of the ChatGPT logs they're complaining about:
> Investigators, he noted, allege that some months prior to the burning of the Pacific Palisades, Rinderknecht had prompted ChatGPT to generate “a dystopian painting showing, in part, a burning forest and a crowd fleeing from it.” A screen at the press conference showed several iterations on such a concept...
Video here, including the ChatGPT "painting" images circa 1m45s: https://xcancel.com/acyn/status/1975956240489652227
(Although, to be clear, it's not like the logs are the only evidence against him; it doesn't even look like parallel construction. So if one assumes "as evidence" usually implies "as sole evidence," I can see how the headline could be seen as sensationalizing/misleading.)
aydyn
Why are the comments under that video claiming he was MAGA? He was a registered democrat who donated to Joe Biden.
You literally cant trust anything people say these days its insane.
aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA
I wonder why he contributed $2 ($1 on two separate occasions). Did $1 get you access to a political blog or something back in 2020?
libraryatnight
He donated to Biden, but had no registered party. Congrats, you're part of the insanity.
I'm sort of grossed out by people trying to blame a party for this in general, though. It's weird.
mtillman
OpenAI also literally announced that they send data to law enforcement after a judge told them they had to do so.
swyx
they HAD to? didnt Apple refuse to do this exact thing?
rogerrogerr
Apple refused to create new software to allow the FBI to brute force an encrypted device. OpenAI just had this info floating around on hard drives.
lotsofpulp
If you are referring to the incident below, it is different because the government asked Apple to write software to allow access to the device:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93FBI_encryption_d...
If Apple had simply had the text records, they would have had to comply with the government order to provide them.
kube-system
Every company must comply with lawful warrants and subpoenas.
trenchpilgrim
EDIT: Original parent was "Every company does this."
Not Mullvad. Swedish police showed up looking for some dat, Mullvad didn't even collect what they wanted, police left empty handed.
rafram
> But more curious than the allegation that a Florida man was responsible for setting a small brush fire on the other side of the country
As far as I’ve heard from other articles, he lived in the Palisades at the time and worked as an Uber driver there. He moved to Florida after the fire. This is not very well researched.
hannasanarion
This title is misleading. The article doesn't say that the chat history will be used as evidence, only that it exists. Whether it can be used in court is an unsettled question, as explained in the last few paragraphs.
nightpool
How is it unsettled? If they got a warrant for it, what would prevent them from using it as evidence?
beefnugs
Another thread says they tried to use his past "drawing a fire related photo" to try and paint him as some kind of pyromaniac. These clods just cant help themselves but to prove AT THE FIRST CHANCE that they will twist and abuse anything they can get their hands on to paint some kind of picture. Its hilarious that they cant even keep this in their back pockets to wait for a real real bad hard to persecute criminal to use it on either
gundmc
Not surprising. Search and browsing history has been used as evidence for some time.
NotPractical
Nearly anything that isn't end-to-end encrypted is fair game, assuming there is probable cause. Access to your physical location history (even if you weren't suspected of a crime) wasn't off limits until 2024 [1]. (It still isn't off limits if you are suspected of a crime, but is no longer collected at the scale of "most Android users" [2].)
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/08/federal-appeals-court-...
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/16/google-geofence-warrants-l...
vintermann
Chats with chatgpt are end to end encrypted (it's https), but one of the ends is OpenAI.
kube-system
End-to-end encrypted data is also fair game -- the only difference is that there are simply fewer parties that have the data to give.
preciousoo
Coming into the thread(and general discussion about chatgpt being used as evidence) with this context, I’m confused about the reactions to this. Online activity has been used as evidence as far as I remember. OpenAI also has a couple high profile cases against them with chatgpt history used as the primary evidence
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mmaunder
Can't wait for the "Did ChatGPT Burn Down Palisades?" headline.
dylan604
"This felony charge, he added, carried a mandatory minimum prison sentence of five years in federal prison but is punishable by up to 20 years in prison."
Are the 12 deaths separate charges? A sentence of 5-20 years seems very light for 12 deaths. This article is clearly focused on the AI aspect of it, so it doesn't cover the charges at all really.
dawatchusay
Please correct me if I’m wrong but it’s my understanding he didn’t start the fire that burned much of the Palisades; he started a fire that was put out (or at least was claimed to be so) which rekindled later and the rest is history.
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dabinat
They are not (yet) charging him with the deaths, only the fire damage.
thaumasiotes
Hmmm.
I have a "saved" history in Google Gemini. The reason I put "saved" in scare quotes is that Google feels free to change the parts of that history that were supplied by Gemini. They no longer match my external records of what was said.
Does ChatGPT do the same thing? I'd be queasy about relying on this as evidence.
x______________
Could you post some details about this or make a write-up? I'd be interested in reading more about this.
thaumasiotes
I'm not sure what details would add. What happened:
1. I engaged with Gemini.
2. I found the results wanting, and pasted them into comment threads elsewhere on the internet, observing that they tended to support the common criticism of LLMs as being "meaning-blind".
3. Later, I went back and viewed the "history" of my "saved" session.
4. My prompts were not changed, but the responses from Gemini were different. Because of the comment threads, it was easy for me to verify that I was remembering the original exchange correctly and Google was indulging in some revision of history.
renewiltord
I sure hope that cats in military uniforms don't invade NYC because they're going to find the evidence on my ChatGPT account.
gpm
Are we talking house cats here, or full grown lions, or gozilla-cats?
Godzilla cats really seems like it needs a movie.
system2
ChatGPT and Google are different types of engines. I wonder if they will make ChatGPT submit flagged questions to authorities automatically. Since the questions are more like conversations with clear intentions, they can get very clear signals.
gpm
> they can get very clear signals.
No they can't. People write fiction, a lot of it. I'm willing to bet that the number of fiction related "incriminating" questions to chatgpt greatly numbers the number of "I'm actually a criminal" questions.
Also wonder about hypotheticals, make dumb bets, etc.
themafia
You don't even need to make bets. Encoded within the answer of "what is the best way to prevent fires" is the obvious data on the best way to start them.
pols45
They can do whatever they want. It's a dead end.
End of the day, a chimp with a 3 inch brain has to digest the info tsunami of flagged content. That's why even the Israelis didn't see Oct 7th coming.
Once upon a time I worked on a project for banks to flag complaints about Fraud in customer calls. Guess what happened? The system registered a zillion calls where people talked about fraud world wide, the manager in charge was assigned 20 people to deal with it, and after naturally getting overwhelmed and scapegoated for all kinds of shit, he puts in a request for few hundred more, saying he really needed thousands of people. Corporate wonderland gives him another 20 and writes a para in their annual report about how they are at the forefront of combatting fraud etc etc.
This is how the world works. The chimp troupe hallucinates across the board, at the top and at the bottom about what is really going on. Why?
Because that 3 inch chimp brain has hard limits to how much info, complexity and unpredictability it can handle.
Anything beyond that, the reaction is similar to ants running around pretending they are doing something useful anytime the universe pokes the ant hill.
Herbert Simon won a nobel prize for telling us we don't have to run around like ants and bite everything anytime we are faced with things we can't control.
astrange
To be clear there is exactly nothing you're required to submit to the government as a US service provider, if that's what you mean by authorities.
If you see CSAM posted on the service then you're required to report it to NCMEC, which is intentionally designed as a private entity so that it has 4th amendment protections. But you're not required to proactively go looking for even that.
The headline and article try to bias and frame the story to make people question: "Is OpenAI snitching on me?"
In reality, Uber records and conflicting statements incriminated him. He seems to be the one who provided the ChatGPT record to try to prove that the fire was unintentional.[1]
> He was visibly anxious during that interview, according to the complaint. His efforts to call 911 and his question to ChatGPT about a cigarette lighting a fire indicated that he wanted to create a more innocent explanation for the fire's start and to show he tried to assist with suppression, the complaint said.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/california-wildfires-palisades-lo...