Thread

1. throwaway89864 · 1790565223 · focus · HN ↗

   The issue is that communications with A.I. are not privileged like client-attorney. There was some judge that made that ruling.

   Feels like a conflict of interests to me, I'd guess friends, neighbors, children and nieces of that judge enjoying their livelihood by charging for legal services. While legal services are now available under substantially lower rates and with a lot fewer conflicts of interests from A.I. providers...

   1. anon373839 · 1790567696 · focus · HN ↗

      This is a completely straightforward application of existing law on privilege. To maintain privilege, among other things, communications must be confidential.

      Chatting with Claude breaks confidentiality: chats with Claude are subject to arbitrary inspection by Anthropic employees, not to mention the issue of model training.

      You can use self-hosted LLMs without breaking privilege. And funny enough, law firms like Latham & Watkins are now buying Nvidia GPU clusters for this purpose.

      1. jryle70 · 1790570072 · focus · HN ↗

         > communications must be confidential.

         Email and phone calls are considered confidential, even though it is possible for vendors to inspect the communication. I expect AI use will be tested legally, but once precedence has been established in court it will become a common practice.

         1. anon373839 · 1790572087 · focus · HN ↗

            > Email and phone calls are considered confidential, even though it is possible for vendors to inspect the communication.

            It's a weak analogy. Ordinary comms infrastructure providers actually have pretty robust policies, technical, and contractual measures in place that restrict employee access to customer communications. In contrast, in the wild west of generative AI, companies actively monitor session data for the content itself, in order to exploit it for their own business purposes. There is zero expectation of privacy.

            So I don't share your expectation that precedent will uphold the use of consumer-tier services (in their current form) for handling privileged material.

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