Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
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- OpenAI has been spotted working on a new feature that would let you lock your chats. Locked chats could let you hide saved ChatGPT conversations from your sidebar, history, and search results behind a PIN or fingerprint.
- Unlike Temporary Chats, locked chats are designed to stick around, giving users a way to save sensitive conversations without leaving them visible in their regular history.
- Locked chats could also create a privacy boundary for Memory, letting new information from locked conversations personalize other locked chats without spilling into regular conversations.
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:
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Locked chats Protect chats with a PIN or fingerprint. How do locked chats work? Lock a chat to keep its title and content out of view in your regular sidebar, history, and search results. You’ll need your PIN or fingerprint to open it.
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.
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Will a chat stay locked after you open it? Yes. It stays locked until you choose to make it a regular chat. How does memory work with locked chats? Locked chats can use what ChatGPT remembers from both regular and locked chats. After you lock a chat, new messages can personalize other locked chats, but not regular chats. Locking a chat doesn’t remove information ChatGPT may already remember.
We currently don’t know exactly what the feature would look like, and are left to infer how OpenAI intends for things to work based on the strings. But we can see that the AI giant seems concerned about the possibility of users confusing Temporary Chats and locked chats — if and when this all goes live, the onboarding material will clearly lay out the distinction:
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How are temporary chats different from locked chats? Temporary chats aren’t saved to your chat history. Locked chats let you save a conversation while keeping them out of view. Temporary chats aren’t saved and don’t create memories unless you choose to save them to your chat history. Locked chats are saved, protected by an Account PIN, and create memories separate from your general memory. You can lock any saved chat.
The presence of all these strings might suggest we’re looking at a fairly imminent launch, but we still don’t know the full picture here. Plans can change, and there’s no guarantee that locked chat support will make its way out to users soon, or at all.
⚠️ An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
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