OpenAI began rolling out Locked Chats on Tuesday 20 October, according to TechCrunch. A user can move a conversation behind a four-digit PIN, or behind Face ID or Touch ID on devices that support it. The target is the moment you hand your phone to a relative and they glance at your history.
Locked threads sit in their own section, out of normal history, pinned items, and search. Unlike Temporary Chats, which vanish after the session, they stay available whenever you return. With Memory switched on, the locked section keeps a separate memory, so details from those chats do not surface in everyday conversations.
The limits are plain. OpenAI says the lock is not end-to-end encryption, does not shorten how long chats are retained, and leaves the “Improve the model for everyone” setting untouched. Resetting the PIN permanently deletes everything it protected. Group chats, shared-link chats, and archived chats cannot be locked.
It is available on every ChatGPT tier from Free to Enterprise, except ChatGPT for Healthcare. For shared family devices, it is a cheap fix. For anything legally sensitive, the data still lives on OpenAI’s servers.
Reported by TechCrunch on 20 October 2026.
