Snapchat treats My AI chats unlike disappearing messages

The design

My AI is Snap's chatbot inside Snapchat, and Snap maintains a dedicated support page, My AI Privacy FAQs, separate from Snapchat's general privacy policy. Archived by the Wayback Machine after the live page began requiring sign-in, the FAQ states that a user can view My AI messages in their Chat, and answers directly: “Do you retain my data after the message to MY AI disappears from our Chat? Yes, your interactions with My AI may be stor[ed] until you delete them.” That is a different retention rule from Snapchat's ordinary disappearing-message design.

What the evidence says

Snap's own explanation for the difference appears in a company post, Early Learnings from My AI and New Safety Enhancements, published 4 April 2023: “we have been deliberate in treating the associated data differently, because we are able to use the conversation history to continue to make My AI more fun, useful, and safer.” The same post says Snap runs internal reviews of My AI queries and responses flagged as “non-conforming,” and reports that its “most recent analysis found that only 0.01% of My AI's responses were deemed non-conforming” — a company-reported figure, not an independently audited one.

What it asks of people

Both documents say Snap tells users up front, through an onboarding message, that My AI conversations are kept unless the user deletes them, which asks a user to actively manage their own chat history if they want it removed rather than relying on Snapchat's usual expiry behaviour. The FAQ's deletion mechanic mirrors ordinary Snapchat messages: press and hold to save or delete. Neither document states a maximum retention period if a user never deletes a conversation.

Privacy and safeguards

The FAQ points users toward Snap's general Privacy Center for broader practices and offers an in-chat feedback mechanism for flagging a bad response. The 2023 post frames human review of retained conversations as a safety measure for tuning guardrails, which means retained My AI content is not simply stored passively; Snap describes actively examining a sample of it. Neither source specifies how long flagged conversations are kept during that review process.

• How would a user learn that a past My AI conversation had been part of a safety review?
• Does deleting a My AI message from Chat also remove it from any retained review sample?
• What happens to My AI history if a user never manually deletes any of it?

Snap's dedicated FAQ and its own explanatory post agree on the core point: My AI's chat retention is a deliberate design choice, justified by the company as necessary to improve and secure the feature, and it is explicitly not the same retention model Snapchat applies to messages between people.