THE GREENE ROOM
You can probably guess the answer to that question but the backstory is still quite interesting.
The issue was addressed by a New York Federal court in a landmark decision denominated United States v Heppner (25 Cr. 503 (JSR), 2026 BL 52143, 2026 Us Dist. Lexis 32697 (S.D.N.Y. Feb. 17, 2026).
The Facts: Bradley Heppner was charged by a grand jury with securities fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy, making false statements to auditors, and falsifying corporate records. At a high level, the indictment charged that Mr. Heppner defrauded his company’s investors out of more than $150 million.
When the FBI searched Mr. Heppner’s home, they seized numerous documents and computers. Among the seized mvaterials were 31 documents that memorialized communications Mr. Heppner had with the generative AI platform “Claude”, which is owned by the private company Anthropic. The substance of those communications was a proposed legal strategy that Claude recommended to Mr. Heppner to defend the charges against him.
Mr. Heppner’s flesh-and-blood attorney asserted the attorney-client privilege over the AI documents, arguing that the documents were created based on information Mr. Heppner had learned from a real attorney, that they were made for the purpose of speaking with counsel to obtain legal advice and that the AI documents were later shared with the real attorney. The government objected, and the Court sided with the feds.
The Court’s logic is rationale enough. Claude is not an attorney. The communications lacked “confidentiality”, a critical cornerstone of the attorney-client communication privilege, because Anthropic’s written policy specifically provides that it collects data on both users’ “inputs” and Claude’s “outputs”, and that it reserves the right to disclose data to a host of third parties, including “governmental regulatory authorities”.
Case closed? For now perhaps. But what if Anthropic changes its policy and ensures the confidentiality of communications. How does a case like this impact the websites of attorneys that contain chatbots? And how does it affect a company like Legal Zoom, or other legal applications? Only time will tell. On thing is certain. AI is going to throw a wrench into many of the time-honored protocols and assumptions that have remain unchanged within the legal community for decades if not centuries. It is a brave new world, and the rules are being rewritten every day.
THE CASE: chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.hrlegalist.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2026/03/1-United-States-v.-Heppner.pdf
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