OpenAI has added Locked Chats to ChatGPT. You can move a conversation into a protected area behind a PIN or your phone’s biometrics, and it then disappears from your history, your pinned chats and search. It is a handy privacy tool, but it is not encryption, and forgetting the PIN has a harsh price.
Reports date the announcement to 20 October. Here is how it works and what to know before you use it.
What Locked Chats are
Locked chats let you keep selected conversations in your account while hiding them from your regular chat history, pinned chats and ordinary search, according to OpenAI’s help article. They live under Projects > Locked chats.
To lock one, open the ••• menu in an eligible chat and choose Lock chat. If you do not see that option, the feature may not have reached your account yet, because the rollout is gradual.
How you open them
| Where you use ChatGPT | How you unlock |
|---|---|
| Web and desktop | A four-digit PIN for your account |
| Supported phones | Face ID, Touch ID or your device’s unlock method, such as an Android fingerprint reader |
Memory stays separate
Locked chats have their own isolated memory. Personal details you discuss in them are not meant to turn up in ordinary chats, and memories saved before you locked a chat stay in your main profile. One report adds that what you say inside locked chats can be remembered in later locked chats.
What Locked Chats do not do
- They are not end-to-end encrypted. Android Headlines reports that locking a chat does not add end-to-end encryption, and that OpenAI keeps records under its standard security policies. OpenAI’s help article makes the same point: there is no separate encrypted vault.
- Not every chat can be locked. Temporary sessions, archived chats and group chats are excluded, and so are ChatGPT for Healthcare accounts.
Our reading: this suits someone who shares a device or does not want a private chat showing up in the sidebar. It does not change what OpenAI itself holds.
The catch: forgetting the PIN
If you reset your PIN, OpenAI permanently deletes your locked chats, the files you uploaded to them and other content saved there. One report says support cannot recover them. Pick a PIN you will remember, and keep anywhere else anything you cannot afford to lose.
Who gets it
Reports list ChatGPT Free, Go, Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu, rolling out gradually. We found nothing specific about the UK, so we cannot say when it will appear for each account.
For another recent ChatGPT change, see our piece on ChatGPT’s “Intelligent UI”. For why control over what AI systems can reach matters, see India’s report on AI agents that reached live systems without authorisation.
What we could not confirm
We could not open OpenAI’s help article, so the details come from the excerpts we saw and from news coverage that cites it. We have not tested the feature ourselves.
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