OpenAI won't let some customers export chat history, but this tool can

ai and ml

ChatGPT Business and Enterprise users lack the standard chat export option, so third-party utilities like scrapemychats fill the gap

ChatGPT Business and Enterprise users cannot export workspace chats through OpenAI's standard data export option, but a new free tool offers an unofficial way to retrieve their accessible chat records.

“I made the stupid decision to upgrade from a personal account to a Business one a while back as they prompted, and for some reason OpenAI doesn't let you export the data easily,” Quilty-Harper explained to The Register in an email.

OpenAI says right on its help page about chat exports that Free, Plus, Pro, and some Edu customers can export their chats, but Business and Enterprise workspaces don't have access to that export option.

Never fear, however, as scrapemychats will be able to liberate those messages - at least until OpenAI closes the loophole it exploits.

Until that happens, scrapemychats is available on GitHub for you to snag a copy of those chats before you close up shop at the House of Altman. The app works through a logged-in browser session and, as explained in the GitHub README, stores accessible ChatGPT conversations - including available file attachments - in a local archive with an email-like HTML interface that can be opened offline in a browser. The data is stored separately from the interface, too, and Quilty-Harper tells us the stored chats can be used however one likes.

It's not a headless tool, mind you: ChatGPT's bot protection prevents it from running in one. What that means in practice is that scrapemychats navigates through your ChatGPT account, opens your conversations, and stores the conversation data and attachments loaded through the browser.

MORE CONTEXT

OpenAI asks Uncle Sam to let it scrape everything, stop other countries complaining; OpenAI scored an own goal with HuggingFace attack, showing how open Chinese models are winning; OpenAI's Atlas browser doesn't make it to its first birthday; OpenAI admits it was the source of the agent swarm that attacked Hugging Face

That also means it moves slowly, as OpenAI tends to throttle anything that makes too many requests too quickly. Downloading a 600-chat archive will take “a few hours,” the README states. It can be resumed if you need to pause it, though.

Installation can be done via the command line, and all the necessary steps to get it running are included in the GitHub writeup.

“I would quite like to know the reason why ChatGPT doesn't make it easy for paying customers to get access to their data,” Quilty-Harper told us. “I have my suspicions, and as a freelance reporter I'd love it if someone who works there could tell me if they know about this friction.” ®

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