Deleted AI Chats May Leave Clues Behind
Deleting a conversation with an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant may not erase everything the assistant remembers.
Georgia Tech researchers have developed a tool that can recover deleted conversations from AI assistants running on Android phones. The tool, called ORISA, can also rebuild the recovered information into a working AI session.
The findings show that deleting an AI conversation on a phone does not necessarily mean it removes every trace.
The 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.
Local 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.
ORISA searches this memory for pieces of deleted conversations.
In 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.
ORISA 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.
The experiment showed that researchers could recover information the AI had already stopped actively using.
“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.
The 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.
The researchers say the information becomes harder to recover as the phone’s memory is overwritten by other activity.
The 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, a collaboration between the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
