ChatGPT could soon let you lock chats behind a PIN or fingerprint

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Your ChatGPT history isn’t necessarily a record that you want to parade around. From the simple math problems that don’t require AI, to asking ChatGPT to craft an email calling in sick for a day off, and from more serious conversations about private projects, to chats about finances, there are plenty of conversations you might want to keep out of others’ line of sight. With what OpenAI has been spotted developing, keeping these chats away from prying eyes could soon become a lot easier.

For what it’s worth, ChatGPT already lets users leverage Temporary Chats for their sensitive questions. Those conversations aren’t saved to your ChatGPT history, making them great for topics that you don’t want leaving a trail. That, however, is also Temporary Chats’ biggest drawback: You can’t come back to these conversations in the future. This is where locked chats, an in-development feature spotted in the latest ChatGPT Android build, could come in.

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Digging through the app’s latest version 1.2026.230 release, we find evidence towards work on locked chats. It seems as though the feature would let you keep conversations hidden behind PIN or fingerprint authentication. It looks designed to keep chats out of the sidebar, chat history, and ChatGPT search results.

The new build contains some fully fleshed-out strings that appear to explain how locked chats will work:

Opening a locked conversation with authentication wouldn’t automatically unlock it permanently. Locked chats will remain locked until you specifically choose to turn them back into a regular chat. This should be particularly useful if you share your devices with others and don’t want them snooping.

Additionally, these chats will still be able to tap into ChatGPT’s memory gathered from regular chats. However, if the AI creates a new memory from a locked chat, that information will not be carried over to your regular, unlocked conversations. Instead, the new memory will only ever be leveraged to personalize other locked conversations. Think of it as a sandbox for all the sensitive information ChatGPT learns from your private conversations.