Per-chat context mode: Shared or Isolated
I’d like ChatGPT to have a simple per-chat context setting:
Context: Shared | Isolated
- Shared — the chat may use relevant context from other chats, as it does today.
- Isolated — the chat uses only its own conversation context, while still being saved normally in chat history.
Cross-chat context can be useful, but in many workflows it creates more limitations than possibilities.
Separate chats are often used intentionally to test different approaches, assumptions, instructions, or versions of the same task. With automatic cross-chat context, information from another conversation may influence the result and make these experiments difficult or impossible.
When context from another chat is needed, users can transfer it deliberately — selectively, with changes, corrections, or additions. This gives much more control than automatically sharing context between all conversations.
Why this matters: Separate chats can act as controlled context branches. A user may intentionally copy selected context into another chat, change assumptions, add or remove information, and compare how ChatGPT behaves under those changes.
At the moment, if I want to see how the same task behaves under a genuinely different context, I sometimes have to use another AI service because I cannot reliably create that isolation inside my own ChatGPT account. This is frustrating and unnecessarily restrictive.
This should not require disabling memory globally or using Temporary Chat.
Ideally, users should also be able to choose the default for new chats:
Shared by default / Isolated by default.