The courts in Singapore have not had the opportunity to address the issue of whether input by lawyers into generative AI tools and the resulting output are protected by legal advice privilege or litigation privilege.

As of March 2025, the Ministry of Law has been working on guidelines to guide lawyers in the use of generative AI tools, given the risk of inaccurate responses from such tools, and security and privacy concerns regarding generative AI models that store user information and search history to train their model.

Arguably, pending these guidelines, input by lawyers into generative AI tools and the resulting output may be protected by legal advice privilege or litigation privilege if it is sufficiently connected to the provision of legal advice or made for the predominant purpose of litigation (as the case may be). Further, the confidentiality of such input and resulting output will also be determinative of whether the input and output are protected by privilege.

At present, given the uncertainty regarding whether privileged communications remain privileged after they are conveyed to a generative AI tool and whether privilege can attach to the resulting output, users of AI tools (including lawyers) should exercise caution in relation to the information or documents that are transmitted to any AI tool. Further clarification via legislation or case law will be instructive in this regard.