ChatGPT users can now lock individual chats, after OpenAI rolled out a feature that lets people keep specific conversations from surfacing in shared sessions or casual scrolling through their history, TechCrunch reported.
It is a small change, but it addresses one of the most common privacy complaints about AI assistants: every conversation is kept, searchable and easy to stumble across on a shared screen. A per-chat lock gives users a way to separate sensitive threads — health questions, work drafts, personal matters — from the rest of their account.
The feature lands in a week when control over AI tools has been a recurring theme in Washington and in the industry, from draft federal safety legislation to orders removing foreign AI systems from U.S. government devices.
OpenAI has not presented the lock as a security guarantee, and users should still treat anything typed into an AI assistant as stored data. But as assistants accumulate longer and more personal histories, controls like this one are becoming a baseline expectation rather than a bonus.
