How Employee AI Use Destroys Trade Secret Protection: DTSA Plaintiff and Defense Practice After Trinidad (Presented by the Federal Bar Association’s Professional Development Committee)

Every time an employee pastes proprietary information into ChatGPT, that keystroke can extinguish the secrecy a DTSA claim depends on — and courts have started saying so. Trinidad v. OpenAI, Snyder v. Beam Technologies, and United States v. Heppner are converging into a doctrine that treats uncontrolled AI access as a failure of reasonable measures, reframing voluntary disclosure and terms-of-service consent as secrecy-destroying events rather than background facts.

Any litigator handling trade secret matters — and any counsel advising employers who deployed consumer-grade AI without use policies — is already exposed, often operating on pleading templates drafted before these decisions existed.

This program maps how voluntary AI disclosure defeats trade secret status at the pleading stage and summary judgment, distinguishes consumer from enterprise tiers in the reasonable-measures inquiry, and supplies the discovery targets, motion-practice frameworks, and “improper means” theories both sides need. You will leave able to plead trade secret identity with the specificity courts now demand, attack secrecy through ToS and policy gaps, and litigate either side with current doctrine.