Google “systematically destroyed” instant message chats every 24 hours, violating federal rules to preserve potentially relevant communications for litigation, the Department of Justice alleged in a filing that became public on Thursday.
As a result of Google’s default to preserve chats for only 24 hours unless an employee opts to turn on history for the conversation, “for nearly four years, Google systematically destroyed an entire category of written communications every 24 hours,” the department wrote in the filing.
According to the DOJ, Google should have adjusted its defaults in mid-2019 “when the company reasonably anticipated this litigation.” Instead, it relied on individual employees to decide when chats were potentially relevant to future litigation, the department said.
“Few, if any,” did, according to DOJ.
Meanwhile, investigators alleged, Google “falsely” told the government it had “‘put a legal hold in place’ that ‘suspends auto-deletion.'” The government added that “at every turn, Google reaffirmed that it was preserving and searching all potentially relevant written communications.”
The data deletion continued up until as recently as this month when the government indicated it would file a motion for sanctions and an evidentiary hearing, investigators allege. At that point, the DOJ said, Google committed to “permanently set to history on.”
A Google spokesperson said in a statement company officials “strongly refute the DOJ’s claims. Our teams have conscientiously worked for years to respond to inquiries and litigation. In fact, we have produced over 4 million documents in this case alone, and millions more to regulators around the world.”
The alleged issue is one that previously came up in Epic Games’ antitrust litigation against Google.
Epic submitted exhibits in that case that seemed to show some Google employees believed chats were a safer place to conduct sensitive conversations. For example, one exhibit shows an employee comment on a document that says “Since it’s a sensitive topic, I prefer to discuss offline or over hangout,” referring to Google’s chat product.
The parties in that suit hashed out the issue in front of a federal judge in the Northern District of California this year in two evidentiary hearings.
At one of those hearings on Jan. 31, Judge James Donato indicated he would be open to a kind of adverse jury instruction, but one that would allow the jury to draw its own conclusions on what the deletion of messages means for the case.
An adverse jury instruction, in its most stringent form, would instruct a jury that it should assume that the relevant documents that were destroyed would have cast Google in a negative light, according to Eileen Scallen, a professor at the UCLA School of Law, an expert in evidence and civil procedure. A lesser remedy could be to instruct the jury to not hold it against the plaintiff for not having specific documents to back up its claims.
Donato telegraphed that he might issue an instruction that falls somewhere in between, stressing his language was subject to change. He said such an instruction may be something along the lines of telling the jury that if it finds Google didn’t adequately preserve some documents, it may conclude those documents were adverse to the company’s interests.
While it’s difficult to replace the value of documents that could have become important evidence, Scallen said an adverse jury instruction is considered “very damning.”
“The one person the jury respects in a courtroom is the trial judge,” Scallen said in a phone interview late last month regarding the Epic case. “And if the trial judge is telling them you can presume that this was bad news for Google, they’re going to take that to heart.”
The DOJ alleged that even after Epic confronted Google about the chat-deletion concerns in that case, the tech giant still withheld its deletion policy from the federal government “and continued to destroy written communications in this case.”
The practices denied the federal prosecutors the chance to view “candid discussions between Google’s executives, including likely trial witnesses,” the government claimed.
The Justice Department is asking that the court hold that Google violated a federal rule of civil procedure by destroying the chats, order a hearing to figure out how to sanction the company and remedy the alleged destruction of evidence and order it to provide more information about its chat practices.
Scallen said that if Google “didn’t give clear directions to retain” relevant chats “this notion that they left it to the individuals, that’s just not responsible.”
Elon Musk listens as reporters ask U.S. President Donald Trump and South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa questions during a press availability in the Oval Office at the White House on May 21, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images
Tesla shares gained about 5% on Tuesday after CEO Elon Musk over the weekend reiterated his intent to home in on his businesses ahead of the latest SpaceX rocket launch.
The billionaire wrote in a post to his social media platform X that he needs to be “super focused” on X, artificial intelligence company xAI and Tesla as they launch “critical technologies” on the heels of a temporary outage.
“As evidenced by the uptime issues this week, major operational improvements need to be made,” he wrote, adding that he would return to “spending 24/7” at work. “The failover redundancy should have worked, but did not.”
An outage over the weekend briefly shuttered the social media platform formerly known as Twitter for thousands of users, according to DownDetector. Earlier in the week, the platform suffered a data center outage. X has suffered a series of outages since Musk purchased the platform in 2022.
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Musk has previously indicated plans to step away from his political work and prioritize his businesses.
During Tesla’s April earnings call he said that he would “significantly” reduce his time running President Donald Trump‘s Department of Government Efficiency.
In the last election cycle, Musk devoted time and billions of dollars to political causes and toward electing Trump in 2024. However, a story over the weekend from the Washington Post, citing sources familiar with the matter, said that Musk has grown disillusioned with politics and wants to return to managing his businesses.
Last week, Musk said in an interview at the Qatar Economic Forum that he planned to spend “a lot less” on campaign donations going forward.
The comments from Musk precede SpaceX’s Starship rocket Tuesday evening. Pressure is on for the company after two Starship rockets exploded in January and March.
Ahead of the launch, Musk announced an all hands livestream on X at 1 p.m.
Tesla is still facing fallout from Musk’s political foray, with protests at showrooms and other brand damage.
In April, Tesla sold 7,261 cars in Europe, down 49% from last year, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association.
National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said Tuesday that the Trump administration does not want to “harm Apple” with tariffs.
“Everybody is trying to make it seem like it’s a catastrophe if there’s a tiny little tariff on them right now, to try to negotiate down the tariffs,” Hassett told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Tuesday. “In the end, we’ll see what happens, we’ll see what the update is, but we don’t want to harm Apple.”
Hassett’s comments come after President Donald Trump said in a social media post that Apple will have to pay a tariff of 25% or more for iPhones made outside the U.S. Apple has historically manufactured its products in foreign countries including China, India and Vietnam.
“I have long ago informed Tim Cook of Apple that I expect their iPhone’s that will be sold in the United States of America will be manufactured and built in the United States, not India, or anyplace else,” Trump wrote in the post. “If that is not the case, a Tariff of at least 25% must be paid by Apple to the U.S. Thank your for your attention to this matter!”
By some estimates, a U.S.-made iPhone could cost as much as $3,500.
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“If you think that Apple has a factory some place that’s got a set number of iPhones that it produces and it needs to sell them no matter what, then Apple will bear those tariffs, not consumers, because it’s an elastic supply,” Hassett said.
Hasset’s comments continue the administration’s push to pressure companies to shoulder the cost burden of Trump’s tariffs, instead of raising prices for consumers.
Earlier this month, Trump told retail giant Walmart to “EAT THE TARIFFS” after the company warned it would have to pass those added costs on.
Shares of Apple were up more than 1% Tuesday.
Apple did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
Dr. Priti Patel, CMIO at John Muir Health, uses Ambience before starting a patient encounter.
Courtesy of Ambience Healthcare
Artificial intelligence startup Ambience Healthcare on Tuesday announced a new medical coding model that outperforms doctors by 27%.
Ambience uses AI to draft clinical notes in real-time as doctors consensually record their visits with patients. The company used tools from OpenAI to build the new model.
The startup is part of a fiercely competitive market that has taken off as health-care executives search for solutions to help reduce staff burnout and daunting administrative workloads.
The company’s new model can listen to patient encounters and identify ICD-10 codes, which are internationally standardized classifications for different diseases and conditions. There are about 70,000 ICD-10 codes that are regularly updated and used to facilitate billing and other reporting processes in health care.
Ambience said its new ICD-10 model can reduce billing mistakes and help clinicians and professional coders work more efficiently. The model notched a “27% relative improvement over physician benchmarks,” according to a release on Tuesday.
“We’re not replacing doctors or coders,” Brendan Fortuner, Ambience’s head of engineering, told CNBC in an interview.“What we’re doing is we’re liberating them from administration, and we’re fixing mistakes that help make health care better, safer, more cost-effective.”
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Documenting ICD-10 codes has traditionally been a labor-intensive task in health care, but it’s a crucial way to track outcomes, mortalities and morbidities in a standardized way, said Dr. Will Morris, the chief medical officer of Ambience.
“If you think about it from a data perspective, it’s how you can compare and contrast clinician A to B, or health system A to B,” Morris said in an interview. “It’s the cornerstone for quality.”
Ambience’s technology is used at more than 40 health-care organizations, like Cleveland Clinic and UCSF Health. It has raised more than $100 million, according to PitchBook, from investors including Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz and the OpenAI Startup Fund.
The company is reportedly seeking fresh capital at a valuation of over $1 billion, according to a report from The Information. Ambience declined to comment on the report.
Ambience trained its new AI model using OpenAI’s reinforcement fine-tuning technology. This technology allows companies to tune OpenAI’s best reasoning models for very specific domains, like health care.
To validate the model, Ambience tested it against a “gold panel” set of labels, the company said. The labels were established by a group of expert clinicians who evaluated complex clinical cases and came to an agreement on what the right codes were.
Ambience’s AI platform for compliant documentation, CDI, and coding.
Courtesy of Ambience Healthcare
The company then recruited 18 different board-certified doctors and compared their performance on ICD-10 coding accuracy to the model’s performance. That comparison showed the Ambience technology performed 27% better than the physician baseline.
“It shows for the first time that an AI system can actually surpass clinician experts at a very, very important administrative task, especially in coding,” Fortuner said.
Ambience already has similar capabilities available for other medical codes like Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes, and Fortuner said it’s exploring how to tackle other areas like prior authorizations, utilization management and clinical trial matching.
The company’s new ICD-10 model will roll out to customers over the summer.
“Getting it right at the point of care is a fundamental change,” Morris said.