Prosecutors in the Palisades fire trial brought ChatGPT logs into court alongside iPhone location data, security camera footage, and witness testimony. Jonathan Rinderknecht was accused of starting a January 2025 blaze that later became one of the deadliest wildfires in Los Angeles history. According to The Verge, the prosecution cited chatbot exchanges in which he generated images of fire, asked why he felt angry, complained about the wealthy, and recorded a question about whether someone could be blamed if a cigarette started a fire. The jury did not accept the theory. After a 10-2 vote favoring the defense, the judge declared a mistrial.

The juror who spoke afterward gave the case its sharper edge. She said she talks to ChatGPT all the time and became angry at the suggestion that using a chatbot showed a character flaw. That reaction marks a limit prosecutors will keep meeting as private AI use becomes ordinary. A search history can look incriminating because it points to an action already known to have happened. A chatbot record is messier. It can contain fantasy, rehearsal, confession, curiosity, venting, boredom, or a sentence typed because the interface was available at a bad hour. The courtroom now has to decide when a prompt is evidence and when it is only a person speaking into software that answers back.