Your Therapist May Be Using AI to Record Your Sessions. Here's What Happens to That Data.

When you walk into a therapist's office, you share things you haven't told most people, including diagnoses, fears, past trauma, and relationship problems. You share them because therapy only works if you can be honest.

But now, a growing number of therapists are recording those conversations with AI.

According to the 2025 Practitioner Pulse Survey released by the American Psychological Association, 29% of therapists now use AI-powered tools monthly to record sessions, generate transcripts, and automatically create clinical notes.^[1]

Those recordings don't just stay between you and your therapist. They're processed by third-party technology companies. In some cases, therapists even use general-purpose AI tools that were never designed to handle your most sensitive medical information.

Here's what happens to your therapy data, and what you can do to protect it.

AI tools are now transcribing therapy sessions in real time

Platforms including Berries, Blueprint, and SimplePractice can listen to sessions in real time, transcribe conversations, and generate summaries or insurance-ready notes for therapists to review.

Each of those tools was designed to be HIPAA-compliant and is intended to help clinicians spend less time on administrative tasks and more time with patients. In the case of Berries AI, it even includes a policy prohibiting the use of protected health information (PHI), such as audio recordings or medical diagnoses, to train its models.

The trend reached mainstream attention when NPR's Morning Edition covered the growing use of AI recording tools in May 2026. One of the people NPR spoke with was Molly Quinn, a 31-year-old librarian in Fayetteville, Arkansas, who noticed it during a session with her therapist of two years.

Quinn told NPR, "It wasn't until halfway through the session that I realized that she wasn't taking notes herself, like she typically did. She was just, like, letting the iPad stand up." Quinn later said she felt her privacy had been compromised and never returned to that therapist.

Patients in online therapy communities have been raising concerns about AI recording tools since at least 2025, questioning whether their sessions are being stored securely and who ultimately has access.

Therapists themselves are divided.

While AI tools inarguably reduce documentation workloads and help prevent burnout in a profession already facing staffing shortages and rising demand, some clinicians and researchers worry that even a passive recording presence changes what patients are willing to disclose.

What happens to your therapy session data

The data privacy implications go further than who's in the room.

When a HIPAA-compliant tool records your session, that audio is transmitted to the company's servers, transcribed, and processed to generate notes. Your most sensitive personal disclosures — mental health diagnoses, medications, trauma history — are being stored by a private technology company, not just your therapist.

HIPAA compliance sets specific technical standards for how that data must be protected, but it doesn't make systems immune to data breaches. It also doesn't prevent your records from being subpoenaed or accessed in response to a government request.

There's a separate and more significant concern when therapists turn to general-purpose AI tools. A study of mental health practitioners found that 54% who used AI in their practice relied on ChatGPT. Unlike purpose-built therapy tools, ChatGPT lacks a HIPAA compliance agreement, and data entered into it can be used to train OpenAI's models, meaning session content could contribute to the development of a commercial AI system.

According to an All About Cookies AI survey, 97% of Americans believe there should be protections against companies using their personal data to train AI programs — and that's for everyday social media content. Therapy sessions, where people disclose diagnoses, trauma, and mental health histories, represent a far more sensitive category of data.

There are also concerns with accuracy.

Automated systems can misinterpret speech, miss emotional nuance, or misunderstand culturally specific language. If therapists don't carefully review those notes before saving them, errors could become part of your permanent medical record.

You may have already agreed to some of this without realizing it. Consent language for AI-assisted note-taking is often folded into broader intake paperwork and privacy forms, rather than presented as a clear, standalone choice — the kind most people sign on their first appointment without reading closely.

Questions to ask your therapist before your next session

The most direct step is asking your therapist whether they use any AI recording or note-taking tools in your sessions. If they do, here's what to follow up with:

• Which company provides the software, and is it HIPAA-compliant?
• How long is your session data stored, and can you request that it be deleted?
• Who has access to your transcripts and notes beyond your therapist?
• Are any general-purpose AI tools like ChatGPT used at any point in the note-taking process?
• Can you opt out of AI recording and still receive the same care?

You can. Consent is not all-or-nothing, and your therapist is ethically obligated to offer alternatives.

If you've already signed the intake paperwork, it's worth going back and reviewing what you agreed to. AI consent language is sometimes embedded within broader privacy notices rather than surfaced as a separate, explicit decision.

If you're starting with a new therapist, make these questions part of your first conversation, the same way you'd ask about their approach or specialty areas.

Bottom line

AI note-taking tools are genuinely useful for therapists, and the best purpose-built tools represent a real step forward for a profession with unsustainable administrative demands. That's worth acknowledging.

But the technology moves faster than the transparency around it, and therapy is one place where that gap has real consequences. Knowing what tools your therapist uses and what happens to your data afterward is a reasonable thing to ask. A conversation before your next session is the most direct way to find out where you stand.