Your AI prompts are public records. Now what?

Issue No. 6 · Tuesday, September 8, 2026 · By Scott Olsen

PULL UP A CHAIR

Yesterday was Labor Day. If you actually got the whole day off, good, that was kind of the point.

It gets treated like the unofficial last cookout of the summer, fire up the smoker, and get one last three day weekend in, before it's officially pumpkin spice season. It actually started in the 1880s, organized labor pushing for one day a year to recognize the people doing the work, not just the people running things, and Congress made it a federal holiday in 1894. And I will be honest, in eleven years of local government, Labor Day was one of those holidays where half the office was still half-working anyway, checking email between the cookout and the pool, because that is just how it goes when your job is public service. The public does not take a day off from needing you, even on the one day named for the people doing the work.

Which got me thinking about the AI tools we use in government, and their holiday schedule, or lack of one. It did not clock in yesterday. It did not clock out either, because it never really clocked in to begin with. It did not know it was Monday, did not know it was a holiday, and was definitely not standing at a grill wondering if the burgers were done. If anything, yesterday was probably one of its busier days, quietly doing the work of everyone who actually got to step away for a minute.

Trust me, I am not losing any sleep over Skynet coming for our Labor Day holiday. At least for now, somebody still has to decide whether the thing actually gets used, and currently, that somebody is still very much a human being. Hopefully none of us have a complaint sitting in our inbox tomorrow morning from an AI tool we made work straight through the holiday.

Anyway. Hope you got something close to a real day off yesterday, even if you checked your email once or twice out of habit. Back to the regular stuff this week.

THIS WEEK'S PICK

How to actually save your AI prompts

Knowing the rule does not help if you have no copy to produce when someone asks. What that actually looks like depends less on which tool you use and more on whether it is a personal account or a real managed work account.

IF YOUR OFFICE RUNS A REAL MANAGED WORK ACCOUNT

None of these have a self-service export either, and that is actually good news

Here is the part worth knowing before you set up work accounts: once your office moves onto a real managed plan, ChatGPT Team or Enterprise, Claude Team or Enterprise, Gemini inside Google Workspace, or Microsoft 365 Copilot, the individual "export my chats" button disappears for everybody. That is true across all of them, not just Microsoft. Only a workspace admin or owner can pull the data, through the vendor's own admin tools, Google Vault for Workspace Gemini, or Microsoft Purview for Copilot, where an admin can set retention policies and run a Content Search or open an eDiscovery case to pull specific conversations if a records request comes in. One catch specific to Copilot: as of mid-2026, Microsoft treats Copilot chat data as its own retention location, separate from Teams and email, so an existing Teams retention policy does not automatically cover it, an admin has to add Copilot to a policy on purpose. If your office is on any of these managed plans, this is worth a five-minute conversation with IT to confirm retention is actually turned on and covers Copilot specifically, not assumed.

Cost: included with your existing admin or Microsoft 365 tools     Setup: an IT or records admin configures retention once, not a per-employee task

BEFORE YOU ASSUME YOU ARE COVERED

1.  Check whether staff are using personal accounts or office-issued work accounts for AI tools. A personal ChatGPT account is much harder for your office to retrieve records from later, and the UNC School of Government's own guidance specifically recommends requiring work accounts for exactly this reason.

2.  Ask your records officer whether your existing retention schedule already covers this, most schedules were not written with AI chat logs in mind, and "we did not think about it" is not a great answer to give during an actual records request.

3.  If nothing is centrally managed yet, the monthly-export habit above is not a permanent fix, it is a stopgap until your office actually writes AI retention into policy.

THE RULEBOOK

Your AI prompts are public records. Now what?

If you or your staff have typed a work question into ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, or Claude, there is a real chance that conversation is already a public record, whether anyone saved it anywhere or not.

The general rule: both sides of the conversation count

Per a detailed legal analysis from the UNC School of Government, if a prompt or an AI response is created in connection with public business, both count as public records under a typical broad state records law, the prompt because it was "made," the AI's answer because it was "received." Format does not matter. The fact that the conversation lives on a vendor's server instead of your own does not get your office off the hook either, courts have generally held that an agency's ability to access records through an account or contract counts as possession, the same as if the file sat on your own drive.

Where it gets messier: the Pennsylvania ruling

In January 2026, Pennsylvania's Office of Open Records mostly sided with Governor Shapiro's administration after a public radio station requested ChatGPT logs from more than two dozen state agencies. The office upheld exemptions for AI chats that were genuinely personal working notes never shared with anyone, and for conversations that were part of internal, predecisional deliberation. That is a real exemption, but it is a narrow one, not a blanket pass for anything run through an AI tool. As one media-law attorney put it, every AI chat starts out presumptively public, an agency has to prove a specific exemption applies, the default is not privacy.

What it means for you: assume anything typed into an AI tool for work is discoverable unless you can point to a specific, real exemption, not just a hunch that it feels private. Content decides retention, not the tool. A quick brainstorm that never went anywhere may genuinely be a transitory record you can let go per your normal schedule. A prompt or AI-drafted answer that fed into a decision, a complaint response, a personnel matter, a policy position, needs to be kept the same way you would keep any other record on that same topic. When you are not sure, the safest move is asking your records officer before deleting anything, not after.

Source: UNC School of Government, Coates' Canons →     Source: WITF, PA Office of Open Records ruling (Feb 2026) →

FREE THIS WEEK

ONE MORE QUICK WIN

Move staff onto work accounts for AI tools, today if you can

This is the single cheapest fix on this list. An AI account tied to a work email is something your office can actually reach when a records request lands. A personal account someone signed up for on their own phone is not, and you may not even know it exists until it is too late to matter.

Know someone at another city or county who could use this? Forward it over.

Until next week,

Scott Olsen, CGCIO

Former CIO with eleven years in Florida local government

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Practical guidance for local government, not legal or procurement advice.