{"slug": "deleted-ai-chats-may-leave-clues-behind", "title": "Deleted AI Chats May Leave Clues Behind", "summary": "Georgia Tech researchers have built a tool called ORISA that recovers deleted conversations from local AI assistants running on Android phones and rebuilds them into working AI sessions, the university's Cyber Forensics Innovation Laboratory reported at the 2026 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. In one experiment using a fictional assistant built on the ChatterUI Android app, ORISA restored a deleted session that returned 26 of 100 planted project facts, versus 14 accessible in the original session, and the tool recovered conversation data across 60 test configurations spanning 10 Android apps and three AI models. Lead author and Ph.D. student Ken Xu said the method \"can help establish what information someone shared with an AI assistant and what assistance they received,\" while the findings raise privacy concerns for users of on-device assistants, with recoverability declining as phone memory is overwritten.", "body_md": "Deleting a conversation with an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant may not erase everything the assistant remembers.\n\nGeorgia Tech researchers have developed a tool that can recover deleted conversations from AI assistants running on Android phones. The tool, called [ORISA](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/11573549), can also rebuild the recovered information into a working AI session.\n\nThe findings show that deleting an AI conversation on a phone does not necessarily mean it removes every trace.\n\nThe research could give digital investigators a new way to recover information from phones. It also raises privacy concerns for people who use AI assistants that run locally on their devices.\n\nLocal AI assistants run directly on a phone rather than sending conversations to a cloud service. While the local assistant is running, information from conversations can remain in the phone’s working memory even after it is deleted.\n\nORISA searches this memory for pieces of deleted conversations.\n\nIn one experiment, researchers created a fictional AI assistant called “Project Note Keeper” using the ChatterUI Android app. They gave it 100 fictional facts about a project, then deleted the conversation.\n\nORISA recovered information from the deleted conversation and used it to create a new working session. When researchers asked the restored assistant to list the project notes it had been given, it returned 26 facts. The original session could access only 14 facts because the rest had fallen outside its active memory.\n\nThe experiment showed that researchers could recover information the AI had already stopped actively using.\n\n“It can help establish what information someone shared with an AI assistant and what assistance they received,” said Ph.D. student **Ken Xu**, lead author of the study.\n\nThe researchers tested ORISA with 10 Android apps and three AI models. Across 60 test configurations, the tool recovered conversation information that remained in the phone’s memory.\n\nThe researchers say the information becomes harder to recover as the phone’s memory is overwritten by other activity.\n\nThe research was presented at the 2026 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. The paper, titled *Recovering and Rehosting Mobile Local LLM Conversations and Contexts via Memory Forensics,* was authored by Ph.D. students Xu, **David Oygenblik**, **Runze Zhang**, and **Mingxuan Yao**; Research Scientist **Muhammad Ibrahim**; and Associate Professor **Brendan** **Saltaformaggio**. The work was done in Georgia Tech's [Cyber Forensics Innovation Laboratory](https://cyfi.ece.gatech.edu/), a collaboration between the [School of Cybersecurity and Privacy](https://scp.cc.gatech.edu/) and the [School of Electrical and Computer Engineering](https://www.ece.gatech.edu/). \n\n### News Contact\n\nJohn Popham\n\nCommunications Officer for the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/deleted-ai-chats-may-leave-clues-behind", "canonical_source": "https://news.research.gatech.edu/2026/10/13/deleted-ai-chats-may-leave-clues-behind", "published_at": "2026-10-17 09:38:18+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-17 10:01:38.791345+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-safety", "ai-ethics", "artificial-intelligence", "large-language-models"], "entities": ["Georgia Tech", "ORISA", "Ken Xu", "ChatterUI", "David Oygenblik", "Runze Zhang", "Mingxuan Yao", "Brendan Saltaformaggio"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/deleted-ai-chats-may-leave-clues-behind", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/deleted-ai-chats-may-leave-clues-behind.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/deleted-ai-chats-may-leave-clues-behind.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/deleted-ai-chats-may-leave-clues-behind.jsonld"}}