AI and notaries: what you can give ChatGPT without exposing your clients

Which AI for a notary?

An office has two families of tools to choose from. On one side, general-purpose online assistants: ChatGPT, Claude, Le Chat, Copilot. On the other, the solution rolled out by the Conseil supérieur du notariat (CSN), the French national notarial council. In a news item dated July 9, 2026, the CSN announced it had chosen Mistral AI and the French host Scaleway to give offices access to AI “in a secure, controlled European cloud environment that guarantees the notary's professional secrecy” (our translation). The partnership with Mistral AI lasts 18 months; Scaleway provides the infrastructure. The CSN states that notaries remain free to use it or not, and that they may choose other solutions that comply with the AI charter issued by the profession.

Whatever the tool, read its terms before opening an office file in it. Three points matter: where the text goes, how long it is kept, and whether it can be used to train a model.

One rule then applies everywhere: the AI only needs what serves the task. To rephrase a clause or summarize a survey report, it doesn't need to know who is selling, who is buying, or at what price. That is the whole point of anonymization: keep the reasoning, remove the people.

Is there an AI charter for French notaries?

Yes, according to the Conseil supérieur du notariat: its July 9, 2026 announcement states that notaries “may choose other solutions that comply with the AI charter issued by the profession” (our translation). The charter was circulated within the profession; as of October 14, 2026, we have not found its text publicly available on the CSN's websites. Ask your regional chamber of notaries for it.

The IEJ guide gives its spirit, with three principles: “absolute respect for professional secrecy,” “control over the processing of personal data” and “full and complete responsibility for the notarial deed” (our translation). To turn them into the office's internal rules (approved tools, prohibited data, prior anonymization, review), start from our annotated AI policy template and adapt it to the office.

What can ChatGPT do for a notary?

On an anonymized copy, generative AI can save time on four tasks:

• Drafting a letter: a letter explaining the steps of a sale to the client, a reminder for a missing document, a reply to a bank or a property manager.
• Summarizing documents: summarizing co-ownership rules, a lease or a survey report, listing the points to check in a file.
• Proofreading a draft: spotting two contradictory clauses, an undefined term, a repetition, a condition precedent with no deadline.
• Explaining to a client: rephrasing a clause in plain language, preparing a note before a meeting, translating a passage for a foreign client.

In all these cases, the AI works on the structure and meaning of the text. The labels are enough: it understands that [PERSONNE_1] is selling and [PERSONNE_2] is buying, without knowing their names.

What should you not give the AI?

• The raw document: a draft deed, a sale agreement, a copy of a deed or a bank statement as is, with names, addresses and price.
• The decision: the legal characterization, the choice of a structure, the advice given to the client. The AI suggests a wording; the notary decides.
• The figures: duties, fees, shares, deadlines. An amount or calculation produced by the AI is redone with the office's usual tools.
• Checks against official sources: land registration, planning, civil status. They are done with the competent services, not in a conversation.

Can a notary use AI without breaching professional secrecy?

General and absolute secrecy, protected by criminal law

Article 8 of decree no. 2023-1297 of December 28, 2023 on the notaries' code of ethics (code de déontologie des notaires) sets the rule: the notary and anyone under their authority are bound by professional secrecy. The text adds: “Professional secrecy is general and absolute” (our translation). The notary is bound by it under the conditions of the French Criminal Code (Code pénal), whose article 226-13 punishes disclosure of secret information “by one year's imprisonment and a fine of 15,000 euros”.

Staff and service providers too

The professional rules of the notariat, approved by an order of January 29, 2024, state in article 8.1 that secrecy covers everything brought to the notary's knowledge in the course of their duties. The notary must ensure that all staff and service providers are informed of this obligation and comply with it in the same way.

GDPR: only send what is necessary

Clients' information is also personal data. Article 5 of the GDPR requires it to be “adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary in relation to the purposes for which they are processed”: this is the data minimization principle.

Replacing names with labels while keeping the mapping table at the office is the principle of pseudonymization defined in article 4 of the GDPR: the data can no longer be attributed to a specific person “without the use of additional information”, kept separately. The difference with anonymization is explained in our guide to anonymization vs. pseudonymization under the GDPR.

What the IEJ guide says

In December 2025, the foresight and digital section of the CSN's Institut d'études juridiques (IEJ) published a guide, “Introduction à l'intelligence artificielle”, intended for all notaries. Its presentation raises the question of the “precautions and limitations” required by the notary's status as a public and ministerial officer (our translation). According to that presentation, the guide recalls three principles in particular:

• “Absolute respect for professional secrecy”;
• “Control over the processing of personal data”;
• “Full and complete responsibility for the notarial deed”.

The guide also distinguishes free solutions, whose model relies on exploiting the data entered, from paid solutions designed for professional use. Among so-called “private AI” solutions, it mentions “programs that, locally and without transmitting information, anonymize documents” before they are processed by AI (p. 28). It adds a warning: by default, using an AI creates a risk of breaching secrecy, and these solutions require particular vigilance.

Anonymizing before the AI answers the first two. Proofreading everything it produces answers the third.

What to mask in a draft deed or sale agreement before AI?

A draft deed of sale or a preliminary sale agreement concentrates everything that identifies a client: civil status, home address, family situation, assets. Here is what to remove before the AI, and what AnonymFiles finds on its own.

This table describes detection, not a guarantee: no automatic detection is perfect, hence the review of each document. The same person keeps the same label across all documents: Jean Martin becomes [PERSONNE_1] in the sale agreement as in the letters.

Watch out for indirect details. A land registry reference or a lot number designates a specific property. Combined with a date or the name of a small town, they can be enough to recognize a matter. At each review, ask yourself a simple question: would a colleague in the same area recognize the file?

Scanned ID documents and title deeds: a separate case

A sale file also contains scans: ID documents, an old title deed, a family record book, a signed letter. AnonymFiles reads them by local OCR and erases the pixels of detected areas. Review them closely: a photo, a signature or an MRZ strip is masked in one click. Excel files are read too, one table per sheet.

For these documents, start with a question: does the AI need them? Proofreading a sale agreement doesn't require the seller's ID card. If a passage really has to be shown, mask it by hand and check the result. Our guide to anonymizing a scanned PDF or an ID document details the tools and checks.

The method, step by step

Here is the method with AnonymFiles, a desktop app coming soon for Apple silicon Macs and Windows. For a single document, the same steps can be done by hand, as explained in our guide to anonymizing a document before ChatGPT.

1. Gather the file. Export the draft deed, the sale agreement and the letters as Word (.docx) or text PDF from your drafting software; notes in .txt or .md work too. AnonymFiles doesn't touch your practice software and never modifies the originals.
2. Run detection. Names of people, organizations, addresses, emails, French-format phone numbers, IBANs from nine European countries, private dates and ID numbers are found and replaced with stable labels such as [PERSONNE_1] or [ORGANISATION_1].
3. Review side by side. Each original is shown next to its copy. One click masks what detection missed: price, matrimonial regime, land registry references, lot numbers. You approve document by document; nothing is exported without approval.
4. Export. Masked content is truly removed, not hidden under a black box that leaves the text readable. Metadata, annotations, forms and links are removed (see what a PDF's metadata reveals). File names become neutral, and an index lists the exported and excluded documents. A Word file gives a .docx redacted in place, layout preserved, plus a text copy (Markdown) for the AI: body, headers, footers and notes are processed; comments, tracked changes, hidden text, images, macros and properties are removed, never copied over.
5. Work with the AI. Paste into the conversation the instruction provided by the app, so the AI keeps the labels intact. Then attach or paste the copy and make your request: proofread the sale agreement, prepare the letter, summarize the co-ownership rules.
6. Put the names back and proofread. Paste the AI's answer into the app, or import it as a text file: it puts the real names back in, on the computer, as text, Word or PDF. The mapping table stays on the computer and is never part of the export. You proofread, then carry over into the deed what is useful.

On the network side, the app works with no account, no telemetry and no online license check. On Mac, the detection models are included: no connection at all. On Windows, they are downloaded once, on first use, without any document text. The security page details what the app does and doesn't do on the network.

Pricing: €290 excl. VAT per seat per year for one or two seats, €240 excl. VAT per seat per year from three seats; above twenty seats, on quote. Formats, steps and pricing are gathered on the document anonymization software for notaries page.