Georgia Tech researchers built a tool that can pull deleted AI chats from a phone's memory, a reminder that deleting may not fully erase what you typed.
Deleting an AI chat on your phone may not wipe it completely. Researchers at Georgia Tech built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations out of a phone's memory and rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.
Some AI apps run on the phone itself instead of sending your chats to the cloud. That sounds private. But while the app runs, the conversation data sits in the phone's working memory. Deleting a chat inside the app does not necessarily erase it from there. ORISA looks for the leftover fragments and stitches them back together into a live session.
The researchers created a fictional assistant called Project Note Keeper. They fed it 100 facts, then deleted the conversation entirely.
That is still a partial recovery of everything originally shared. But it shows the tool can get back more than the chat itself could recall.
For now, ORISA is built for investigators. It is not an app anyone can download to restore deleted chats. It needs a copy of the phone's memory and storage, and recovery gets harder when other activity overwrites the relevant data. The researchers say it could help investigators piece together what someone shared with an AI assistant and what advice came back. That includes cases where chatbot advice may have harmed patients who never shared the conversations with their doctors.
Anyone who uses AI apps that run on the phone should know that deleting a conversation may not be the clean break it appears to be. If you share sensitive details with such an app, think before you type. The material does not name the apps or models tested, or say whether any app has fixed the issue.
Deleting an AI chat on your phone may not fully erase it, so think twice before typing sensitive details into an AI app.
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