Deleted AI chats can be recovered from phones: ORISA revives chatbots

What it's about

Researchers at Georgia Tech have developed a digital forensics tool called ORISA. It can recover deleted conversations with AI assistants running locally on an Android phone from the device's memory. From the remnants, ORISA even builds a working chat session you can keep talking to. According to Knowridge, the work was presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2026 and was developed in the university's Cyber Forensics Innovation Laboratory. Coverage came from Android Authority (first via Digital Trends), Yahoo Tech and Knowridge, among others.

Why deleted chats don't disappear

Local AI apps are considered private because conversations don't go to cloud servers. The model runs on the device. But while the app is running, parts of the conversation sit in memory. Tapping "Delete" in the interface doesn't necessarily remove the chat there as well. Android Authority compares it to taking a conversation off the screen without wiping every trace underneath. ORISA hunts for these leftovers and pieces them together into a new session.

The test: 26 facts instead of 14

Using ChatterUI, an open-source Android app for running AI models directly on the phone, the researchers built a fictional assistant called "Project Note Keeper." They gave it 100 made-up facts about a project and then deleted the conversation. Because the context window (the amount of text the model can "see" at once) was limited, the original session could only reach 14 facts. The rest had dropped out. ORISA recovered enough data to build a new interactive session that named 26 facts when asked, more than the original session had last had access to. That is only a partial recovery, but it shows that memory holds more than the model was actively using.

Across 60 configurations with 10 Android apps and three AI models, the tool was able to recover conversation data, according to the reports. How much depends on the individual case.

Limits

• ORISA is a tool for investigators, not an app for everyone.
• It needs access to a copy of the phone's memory and data.
• Other activity on the device can overwrite the remnants and make recovery harder.
• The results apply to the local Android systems tested. According to Android Authority and Knowridge, they don't simply carry over to cloud chatbots or every phone.

Possible uses

The researchers see value in reconstructing what someone confided in an AI assistant and what advice they received. They also mention investigating cases in which chatbot advice may have harmed patients who never shared the conversations with their doctors. Android Authority points to apps like Google's AI Edge Gallery, which run models entirely offline.

Our take

It's not new that deleted data can be found on phones, for example messages or photos. What's new is that a live chatbot is reconstructed from it. In practice the risk is limited, because physical or forensic access is required. Still, if you discuss very sensitive things with local AI apps, don't count on "Delete" wiping everything. The sources leave open which specific apps and models are most affected and how developers can protect against this. The details come from media reports about the study, not from the paper itself.