Deleting an AI chat does not erase everything: Georgia Tech study recovers deleted conversations

Using artificial intelligence on a smartphone is now an everyday habit. Whether for work or out of curiosity, many people delete an AI chat afterwards and assume everything is gone for good. But a team of researchers at Georgia Tech University says deleting an AI chat from a phone does not erase all of its traces.

The researchers have built a tool that can recover deleted AI conversations from an Android phone. The tool is named ORISA. It not only finds the lost information, it can also piece the fragments together and fully reactivate the earlier AI session.

The study is mainly about local AI. Services such as ChatGPT or Gemini connect over the internet to large servers; those are cloud AI. Some AI assistants, by contrast, run directly on the phone's processor without the internet; those are called local AI.

Many people assume local AI is safer because personal conversations never go to a server. But the researchers showed that while local AI runs on a phone, its information accumulates in the phone's RAM. Even after the user deletes the chat, fragments of that information remain somewhere in the RAM, and ORISA works from exactly there, searching the memory and pulling the fragments out.

For the test, the researchers used an Android app called ChatterUI to create a fictional AI assistant named 'Project Note Keeper'. They then gave the AI 100 pieces of information about a fictional project and deleted the entire chat history.

ORISA then recovered information from the deleted chat and started a fresh session. When the researchers asked the recovered AI about the earlier project, it accurately returned 26 pieces of information.

Remarkably, before the chat was deleted the original AI session could hold only 14 pieces of information at once, because every AI has a limit on how much it can retain together. Yet ORISA pulled 26 pieces out of memory — meaning it also retrieved, by combing through the RAM, information the AI itself had dropped from its active memory while the chat was running.

Ken Shu, the team's lead researcher and a PhD student, said: 'This tool will be extremely useful for finding out what someone shared with an AI and what help they received in return.'

The researchers tested ORISA on 10 different Android apps and 3 different AI models. Across 60 different scenarios in total, the tool succeeded every time in recovering information left behind in memory.

The study opens a new avenue for digital crime investigators, because criminals who plan something using AI on a phone and then delete it could now have that material recovered by investigators. At the same time, it leaves open the privacy question that ordinary users' personal chats can also be brought back.

There is, however, a reassuring side. The researchers said deleted information does not stay in RAM forever. Running other apps or playing games on the phone fills those memory locations with new information, a process called overwriting. So the more time passes after deletion and the more the phone is used, the harder recovering a lost AI chat becomes.

The research paper was presented at the 2026 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.