Privilege & Work Product · November 2026
United States v. Heppner
Southern District of New York holds that defendant’s exchanges with Claude are not protected by privilege.
820 F. Supp. 3d 292 (S.D.N.Y. 2026)
In what it described as a question of first impression, the Southern District of New York held that neither the attorney-client privilege nor work product privilege applied to documents a criminal defendant created using Claude because Claude is not an attorney, the communications were not confidential given Anthropic’s privacy policy, and the defendant did not use Claude at counsel’s direction.
Sharing the documents with counsel later did not help, because non-privileged communications are not “alchemically changed into privileged ones upon being shared with counsel,” and inputting privileged information into Claude waived the privilege. The materials were not work product because the defendant “acted on his own” and they did not reflect counsel’s strategy.