Warner v. Gilbarco (ChatGPT work product)

What happened

Sohyon Warner, proceeding without counsel, sued Gilbarco, Inc. and others. The defendants sought production of documents concerning her use of third-party AI systems including ChatGPT, and argued that using such a system waived any work product protection over the material involved.

The waiver argument is the one that matters, and it rests on an analogy. Disclosing a privileged communication to a third person generally waives attorney-client privilege. If a chatbot is a third person, the analogy carries. If it is not, it does not.

What the court did

The court denied the request, finding the information neither discoverable nor relevant.

It rejected the analogy directly, stating that ChatGPT and other generative AI programs are tools, not persons, even if they may have administrators somewhere in the background. It then drew the distinction the defendants had elided: the work product waiver has to be a waiver to an adversary, or in a way likely to get the material into an adversary's hands. And it noted that while a voluntary disclosure to a third person will generally suffice to show waiver of attorney-client privilege, it should not suffice in itself for waiver of the work product privilege.

The two protections come apart here, and the reasoning explains why several later courts treat a party's AI session differently from a party's conversation with an outsider.

Where it stands

The order is a magistrate judge's discovery ruling. No objection and no later ruling on the point were located as of September 28, 2026.

It has been followed. Tate Group Automotive v. Legacy Automotive Capital adopted its waiver reasoning together with Morgan v. V2X in sustaining work product over a non-lawyer's ChatGPT conversations, while still ordering disclosure of the materials that had been shared with the system. The contrary pole is United States v. Heppner, and further from it still is the Upper Tribunal's statement in the Munir proceedings that uploading confidential documents to an open system places the information in the public domain and waives privilege outright.

The obligation it engaged

The decision engages Clause 6, custody and confidentiality, from the direction experts least expect. The holding is protective, but the protection turns on whether the material was likely to reach an adversary, which is a question about the provider's terms and retention rather than about the expert's intent. An expert who cannot say what the provider does with inputs cannot predict which way this analysis runs.

It also engages Clause 7, contemporaneous record, by implication. The party here could describe her use well enough for the court to rule on it. A party who cannot is arguing about a record nobody can see.

Sources

• AI Discovery Database (Damien Charlotin) · September 28, 2026
  Warner v. Gilbarco, Inc.

What could not be confirmed

District Judge Gershwin A. Drain is reported as presiding over the case; the order read is the magistrate judge's. Whether an objection was filed was not determined.