OpenAI has launched Locked Chats, a ChatGPT feature that lets you put specific conversations behind a four-digit PIN, Face ID, or Touch ID. According to TechCrunch AI, the rollout started Tuesday, so some users won’t see it yet. The point is simple: if you hand your phone to a friend to show them one chat, they shouldn’t be able to scroll into another.
This matters because people now use ChatGPT for a lot more than coding help and email drafts. They talk to it about health worries, money problems, relationships, and surprise party plans. Until now, anyone holding your unlocked device could see all of it.
🔐 What Locked Chats Actually Does
Here’s how the feature works, based on TechCrunch AI’s reporting:
- Lock with a PIN or biometrics. You protect locked chats with a four-digit PIN, or with Face ID or Touch ID on devices that support it.
- A separate home for sensitive chats. Once you lock a chat, it moves to its own “Locked Chats” section. It no longer shows up in your regular history, your pinned conversations, or chat search results.
- Its own memory. If you have Memory turned on, Locked Chats gets a separate memory that’s shared only across conversations in that section. New messages in a locked chat can update that memory, but they don’t touch your regular Memory. So details from a private chat won’t show up later in a normal one.
- You can come back anytime. This is the big difference from Temporary Chats. A temporary chat is a one-off session that never lands in your history. A locked chat stays saved, and you can return to it whenever you want.
⚠️ What It Doesn’t Do
OpenAI is upfront about the limits, and they’re worth reading closely. Locking a chat keeps it away from people looking at your screen. It doesn’t change how OpenAI stores or handles your data.
According to OpenAI, locking a chat does not:
- Add end-to-end encryption or create a separate encrypted vault
- Change how long ChatGPT keeps the conversation
- Remove anything ChatGPT remembered before you locked the chat
- Change your “Improve the model for everyone” setting
My take: think of this as a lock on a drawer, not a safe. It stops a nosy roommate. It doesn’t change anything about what happens on OpenAI’s servers. If your concern is data retention or model training, you still have to manage those settings yourself.
🚫 Fine Print and Exclusions
There’s one serious catch. If you reset your PIN, all your locked chats are permanently deleted, along with the files and other content the old PIN protected. Forget the code and that content is gone for good. Pick a PIN you’ll actually remember.
You also can’t lock every kind of conversation. The option isn’t available for:
- Temporary chats
- Archived chats
- Group chats
- Chats created from a shared link
- Chats with scheduled tasks
- Chats with meeting recordings
📱 Who Gets It
Locked Chats is coming to ChatGPT Free, Go, Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Edu plans. That means it isn’t locked behind a paywall, which is the right call for a basic privacy feature. The one exception is ChatGPT for Healthcare, where the feature isn’t available.
🧭 Why This Matters
What stands out here is the shift in how OpenAI treats ChatGPT. Messaging apps went through the same stages. WhatsApp, Telegram, and iOS itself all added ways to hide or lock specific conversations once people started trusting those apps with private stuff. ChatGPT is now following that path, which says a lot about how personal the conversations have become.
The separate memory is the smartest part of the design. AI memory has become a quiet privacy problem: something you mention once can show up weeks later in an unrelated chat, maybe while someone else is watching. Walling off locked chats from your main memory tackles that directly.
Still, this is a convenience feature, not a security overhaul. The bigger questions about how AI companies store, keep, and train on intimate conversations are still open. Expect pressure to keep building for real encryption options, especially as competitors look for ways to stand out on privacy.
Full details, including the rollout timing, are in the original TechCrunch AI report.