Can no longer mass select and copy entire conversation.

On 12 May, users began noticing that ChatGPT had quietly removed the ability to mass-select and copy an entire conversation in one action. No announcement. No changelog. No acknowledgment of any kind from OpenAI. The feature was there, and then it wasn't — at least for the users who noticed its absence on that date. In the days since, no additional reports have surfaced to widen the picture, and OpenAI has offered nothing by way of explanation. One signal, one platform, one date. That is still where this story lives. But the silence is starting to accumulate its own meaning. Accidental regressions get fixed quickly and quietly. Deliberate removals get ignored for longer, and this one has now been ignored for long enough to make the accidental explanation feel less comfortable.

If confirmed, here is what this means. The ability to copy a full conversation was one of those features that sat beneath the surface of daily use but mattered enormously to specific people: researchers logging AI outputs, developers auditing model behaviour, writers pulling transcripts into their workflow, anyone building a paper trail of how a session unfolded. Removing it doesn't break ChatGPT in any obvious way — most users will never feel it — but it does quietly raise the friction around documentation and portability. That friction benefits OpenAI. Conversations that are harder to export are conversations that stay inside the ecosystem longer, re-opened rather than archived elsewhere. Whether that is a deliberate design philosophy or a side effect of some interface restructuring, the practical result is the same: users lose a small but meaningful degree of control over their own data. The second-order effect is subtler still — it erodes the kind of trust that accumulates through small, reliable affordances, the quiet confidence that what you can do today you will still be able to do tomorrow.

Watch for an OpenAI changelog entry or a community moderator response acknowledging the change — either would confirm this is intentional and force the question of why. A spontaneous return of the feature without explanation would suggest a rollout error, and would be its own kind of answer.

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