It was the kick in the pants I needed to cancel my subscription.
https://claude.ai/settings/data-privacy-controls
It was easy to not opt-in, I got prompted before I saw any of this.
I think they should keep the opt-in behavior past Sept 28 personally.
Nitpicking: “opt in by default” doesn’t exist, it’s either “opt in”, or “opt out”; this is “opt out”. By definition an “opt out” setting is selected by default.
At which exact point is language prohibited from evolving, and why it super coincidentally the exact years you learnt it?
Never?
No, (IMO) an "opt out" setting / status is assumed/enabled without asking.
So, I think this is opt-in, until Sept 28.
Opt-in, whether pre-checked/pre-ticked or not, means the business asks you.
GDPR requires "affirmative, opt-in consent", perhaps we use that term to mean an opt-in, not pre-ticked.
> So, I think this is opt-in, until Sept 28.
If the business opted for consent, then you will effectively have the choice for refusal, a.k.a. opt-out.
Implicit consent is not transparent and should be illegal in all situations. I can't tell you that unless you opt out, You have agreed to let me rent you apartment.
You can say analogy is not straightforward comparable but the overall idea is the same. If we enter a contract for me to fix your broken windows, I cannot extend it to do anything else in the house I see fit with Implicit consent.
Grabbing users during start up with the less privacy focused option preselected isn't being "very transparent"
They could have forced the user to make a choice or defaulted to not training on their content but they instead they just can't help themselves.
Except not:
> The interface design has drawn criticism from privacy advocates, as the large black "Accept" button is prominently displayed while the opt-out toggle appears in smaller text beneath. The toggle defaults to "On," meaning users who quickly click "Accept" without reading the details will automatically consent to data training.
Definitely happened to me as it was late/lazy.
Never mind the complete 180 on privacy.
Opt-out leads to very high adoption and is the immoral choice.
Guess which one companies adopt when not forced through legislation?
The fact that there's no law mandating opt-in only for data retention consent (or any anti-consumer "feature") is maddening at times
You can say that you want to opt out. What Anthropic will decide to do with your declaration is a different question.
I have to admit, I've used it a bit over the last days and still reactivated my Claude pro subscription today so... Let's say it's ok for casual stuff? Also useful for casual coding questions. So if you care about it, it's an option.
Self plug here - If you aren't technical and still want to run models locally, you can try our App [1]
You could try programming with your own brain
Export data
Shared chats
Location metadata
Review and update terms and conditions
I'm in the EU, maybe that's helping me?
It's part of the update
No one cares about anything else but they have lots of superflous text and they are calling it "help us get better", blah blah, it's "help us earn more money and potentially sell or leak your extremely private info", so they are lying.
Considering cancelling my subscription right this moment.
I hope EU at leat considers banning or extreme-fining companies trying to retroactively use peoples extremely private data like this, it's completely over the line.
I'd love to live in a society where laws could effectively regulate these things. I would also like a Pony.
That's why we don't hand billions of dollars to a child. Maybe we should treat AI companies similar.
Its only utopian because it's become so incredibly bad.
We shouldn't expect less, we shouldn't push guilt or responsibility onto the consumer we should push for more, unless you actively want your neighbour, you mom, and 95% of the population to be in constant trouble with absolutely everything from tech to food safety, chemicals or healthcare - most people aren't rich engineers like on this forum and i don't want to research for 5 hours every time i buy something because some absolute psychopaths have removed all regulation and sensible defaults so someone can party on a yacht.
Also, for others who want to opt-out, the toggle is in the T&C modal itself.
As if barely two 9s of uptime wasn't enough.
“If you do not choose to provide your data for model training, you’ll continue with our existing 30-day data retention period.“
From the support page: https://privacy.anthropic.com/en/articles/10023548-how-long-...
“If you choose not to allow us to use your chats and coding sessions to improve Claude, your chats will be retained in our back-end storage systems for up to 30 days.”
I'm looking at
> "When you use the Assistant by Kagi, your data is never used to train AI models (not by us or by the LLM providers), and no account information is shared with the LLM providers. By default, threads are deleted after 24 hours of inactivity. This behavior can be adjusted in the settings."
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/assistant.html#privacy
And trying to reconcile those claims with the instant thread. Anthropic is listed as one of their back-end providers. Is that data retained for five years on Anthropic's end, or 24 hours? Is that data used for training Anthropic models, or has Anthropic agreed in writing not to, for Kagi clients?
The scenario that concerns me is that Claude learns unpublished research ideas from me as we chat and code. Claude then suggests these same ideas to someone else, who legitimately believes this is now their work.
Clearly commercial accounts use AI to assist in developing intellectual product, and privacy is mandatory. The same can apply to individuals.
> Claude then suggests these same ideas to someone else, who legitimately believes this is now their work.
Won't this mean that claude assisted you with someone else work? Sure it's not from a "chat" but claude doesn't really know anything other than it's training data
- Search the web for related ideas. This could help if someone's already had the idea or if there are things to learn from related ideas. - Review your writeup or proofs for mistakes and clarity
None of these things make the idea Claude's. Claude merely helped with some of the legwork.
But Claude now has your idea in clear, plain text to train on. The next time someone hits on even a similar idea, Claude might well suggest your idea outright. Not seeing your idea published, the user has no way to know it isn't a novel idea. If the person is less diligent/thorough, they may well publish first and claim it as there own, without any nefarious intent.
I've seen cases where Claude demonstrates novel behaviors or combines existing concepts in new ways based on my input. I don't think it's as simple as memorization anymore.
You're equating your own perspective as objective truth, which is a very common pitfall and fallacy
It has long been a problem in math research to distinguish between "no one has had this idea" and "one person has had this idea". This used to take months. With the internet and MathSciNet, ArXiv online it took many iterations of guessing keywords. Now, I've spent six months learning how to coax rare responses from AI. That's not everyone's use case.
What complicates this is AI's ability to generalize. My best paper, we imagined we were expressing in print what everyone was thinking, when we were in fact connecting the dots on an idea that was latent. This is an interesting paradox: People see you as most original when you're least original, but you're helping them think.
With the right prompts AI can also "connect the dots".
In a sense these machines are outputting the aggregate of the collective thoughts of the commons. In order for concepts to be output they have to be quite common in the training data. Which works out kind of nice for privacy and innovation because by the time concepts are common enough to show up through inference they probably deserve to be part of the public knowledge (IP aside).
That said, it would be interesting to see a model tuned that way. It could be marketed as a 'creativity model' where the user understands there will be a lot of junk hallucination and that it's up to them to reason whether a concept has validity or not.
https://towardsdatascience.com/a-comprehensive-guide-to-llm-...
Anyone who’s worked in an engineering team is familiar with someone forgetting to check ‘if(doNotDoThisCondition)’.
This is why (among many other reasons) opt-in is more user respecting here than opt-out.
You can no more own knowledge or information than you can own the number 2.
So what?
Maybe real property (which only exists because of a property record held in a government building), but it is self-evident to me (and, I believe, most people) that personal property is a natural right.
One only need look up some TikTok videos of Americans getting pickpocketed in Europe to see how people feel on the matter.
More to the point, respecting your wishes to keep those conversations confidential would risk stifling human progress, so they have to be disregarded for the greater good.
LLM enthusiasts are staunch defenders of the argument that use of everyone's ideas and labour in LLM training isn't just fair use, but a moral imperative in order to advance science, art, and human progress as a whole.
It's beyond hypocritical for beneficiaries of this paradigm to then turn around and expect special treatment by demanding that "their" ideas, "their" knowledge, "their" labour be excluded from this process.
Pulling up the ladder behind you :-)
I had this exact conversation with my business partner a few days ago. Our "secret sauce" might not be worth that much after many years but still I am not comfortable exposing it to Claude. Fortunately it's very easy to separate in our project so Claude gets the other parts and is very helpful.
I think you do:
According to the article https://www.perplexity.ai/page/anthropic-reverses-privacy-st...
"Enterprise and educational customers will continue operating under their existing privacy protections, as the policy changes specifically exclude Claude for Work and Claude for Education services. These commercial accounts remain governed by separate contractual agreements that maintain stricter data handling standards.
Organizations using Claude through business partnerships or educational licenses can continue their operations without concern for the new training policies affecting their sensitive communications or proprietary information."
Thus, I think your claim
> What a shoot your own foot business decision.
likely does not hold: the non-commercial accounts likely led to Anthropic loosing money, so they are not liked by Anthropic anyway (but are a an "inconvenient necessity" to get people to notice and try out your product offering). With this new decision, Anthropic makes this "free-riding" less attractive.
I bet that Anthropic will soon release a press statement (that exists in the drawers for quite a long time) "We are listening to your concerns, and will thus extend our 'privacy-conscious offering' to new groups of customers. Only 30 $ per month."
Certainly not for any users like you and me, it takes two seconds and three clicks to review the new terms and decline chat training. This is more like Anthropic getting easy training from people who are unaware or don't care.
But also, Anthropic has said that this new policy also applies to their Pro ($20/mo) and Max ($200/mo) plans. So its not free versus not free.
And most importantly, you can just opt-out.
Oh the naivety.
Sooner or later they all become the same, soon after "investors" or "shareholders" arrive.
They already arrived. Google was one of the main investors of Anthro.
And - this behavior of Google's has not been penalized, I'm afraid.
(It was one of the first significant value-adds of GMail: at its scale, Google could create a global-concept understanding of the content and pattern of spam across hundreds of millions of users. That was the kind of Big Data that made it possible to build filters where one could confidently say "This is tuned on all spam in the wild, because we've seen all spam in the wild").
But unlike the 100s of data brokers that also want your data, they have an existing operational funnel of your data already that you voluntary give them every day. All they need is dark pattern ToS changes and manage the minor PR issue. People will forget about this in a week.
If they had done this in a more measured way they might have been able to separate human from AI content such as doing legal deals with publishers.
However they couldn't wait to just take it all to be first and now the well is poisoned for everyone.
I've seen zero evidence anything of the such is occurring, and that if it was, it's due to what you claim. I'd be highly interested in research suggesting both or either is occurring however.
To AI companies, data is even more of a gold mine than to adtech companies. It is existentially important.
The truly evil behavior will emerge at the intersection of these two industries. I'm sure Google and Facebook are already using data from one to power the other, even if it's currently behind closed doors. I can hardly wait for the use cases these geniuses will think of once this is publicly acceptable and in widespread use by all companies.
Data gathered for training still has to be used in training, i.e. a new model that, presumably, takes months to develop and train.
Not to mention your drop-in-the-bucket contribution will have next to no influence in the next model. It won't catch things specific to YOUR workflow, just common stuff across many users.
I wonder about this. In the future, if I correct Claude when it makes fundamental mistakes about some topic like an exotic programming language, wouldn't those corrections be very valuable? It seems like it should consider the signal to noise ratio in these cases (where there are few external resources for it to mine) to be quite high and factor that in during its next training cycle.
Learning metric won’t be you, it will be some global shitty metric that will make the service mediocre with time.
Isn't it a great thing for to us to collectively allow LLM's to train on past conversations? LLM's probably won't get significantly better without this data.
That said I do recognize the risk of only a handful of companies being responsible for something as important as the collective knowledge of civilization.
Is the long term solution self custody? Organizations or individuals may use and train models locally in order to protect and distribute their learnings internally. Of course costs have to come down a ridiculous amount for this to be feasible.
It does suck that there are only a few companies with enough resources to offer these models. But it's hard to escape the power laws.
I'm hoping that costs come down to the point where these things are basically a commodity with thousands of providers.
Giving Claude your private data ensures that there will not be thousands of providers, since the limiting factor isn't power but data.
It's not just the risk of irresponsible behaviour (which is extremely important in a situation with so much power imbalance)
It's also just the basic properties of monopolistic markets: the smaller the number of producers, the closer the equilibrium price of the good maximizes the producers' economic surplus.
These companies operate for-profit in a market, and so they will naturally trend toward capturing as much value as they can, at the expense of everyone else.
If every business in the world depends on AI, this effectively becomes a tax on all business activity.
This is obviously not in the collective interest.
Of course, this analysis makes simplifying assumptions about the oligopoly. The reality is much worse: the whole system creates an inherent information asymmetry. Try and imagine what the "optimal" pricing strategy is for a product where the producer knows intimate details about every consumer.
Yeah and Facebook couldn't scale without ignoring the harms it causes people. Should we just let that be? Society seems to think so but I don't think it's a good idea at all.
An in-app notification pop-up will alert you to the change. You can opt out in the pop up.
I was able to opt out right now by going to the Privacy section of Settings.
It doesn’t take effect until September 28th. The app will apparently prompt people to review the new terms and make a decision before then.
Only applies to new or resumed sessions if you do review the new terms and don’t turn it off. The angry comments about collecting data from customers and then later using it without permission are not correct. You would have to accept the new terms and resume an old session for it to be used.
Does not apply to API use, 3rd party services, or products like Claude Gov or Claude for Education.
Changing the link to the actual source instead of this perplexity.ai link would be far more helpful.
I would strongly argue that API clients should NEVER be opted in for these sorts of things, and it should be like this industry wide.
> They do not apply to services under our Commercial Terms, including Claude for Work, Claude Gov, Claude for Education, or API use, including via third parties such as Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI.
I’ll edit my comment above to include this too
The in-app notification that I got was a pop up which contained some buttons and some images. There was no text. Just in case it was some dark mode issue I checked the DOM and I couldn't find any text there either. I just clicked outside the modal and it went away. I assumed it was some announcement about some new feature and ignored it.
I did end up seeing the news yesterday in Reddit (I'm having issues getting the research tool to actually being used, tried to see if there was some recent changes) but it's unlikely that I was the only one who experienced modal the issue & if those didn't follow the tech news they could easily miss the change.
The comments here were from people jumping to co conclusions after skimming an AI summary of news articles about the link. I’m glad it got changed.
I guess I’ll be canceling my subscription largely out of principal. I doubt any open-source models are capable of handling my use case as well as Claude (typically focused on getting up to speed with various ISO/IEEE standards for the purpose of security testing) but I’m sure I’ll find a solution.
Any data you give to any website or app is no longer (exclusively) yours. Use these services under that assumption.
It annoys me greatly, that I have no tick box on Google to tell them "go and adapt models I use on my Gmail, Photos, Maps etc." I don't want Google to ever be mistaken where I live - I have told them 100 times already.
This idea that "no one wants to share their data" is just assumed, and permeates everything. Like soft-ball interviews that a popular science communicator did with DeepMind folks working in medicine: every question was prefixed by litany of caveats that were all about 1) assumed aversion of people to sharing their data 2) horrors and disasters that are to befall us should we share the data. I have not suffered any horrors. I'm not aware of any major disasters. I'm aware of major advances in medicine in my lifetime. Ultimately the process does involve controlled data collection and experimentation. Looks a good deal to me tbh. I go out of my way to tick all the NHS boxes too, to "use my data as you see fit". It's an uphill struggle. The defaults are always "deny everything". Tick boxes never go away, there is no master checkbox "use any and all of my data and never ask me again" to tick.
Basically all AI companies are fruit from the same VC-poisoned tree and I expect these products will get worse and more user-hostile as they try to monetize. We're currently living in the "MoviePass"[1] era of AI where users are being heavily subsidized to try to gain market share. It will not last and the potential for abuse is enormous.
Also in what universe are utter fantasies like "'no one wants to share their data' is just assumed" or "the defaults are always 'deny everything'" true? Tech companies are bypassing user consent all [2] the [3] time [4].
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/96-of-us-users-opt-o...
[2]: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=opt%20out
People die all the time from cancer or car accidents. People very rarely die from data leaks.
Some countries like Sweden make people's private financial data public information - and yet their people seem happier than ever. Perhaps privacy isn't as important as we think for a good society.
There exists another, often unmentioned option. And that option is for state/business to open up, to increase their "information surface" towards us, their citizens/consumers. That will also achieve information (and one hopes power) rebalance. Every time it's actually measured, how much value we put on our privacy, when we have to weight privacy against convenience and other gains from more data sharing, the revealed preference is close to zero. The revealed preference is that we put the value of our privacy close to zero, despite us forever saying otherwise. (that we value privacy very very much; seems - "it ain't so")
So the option of state/business revealing more data to us citizens/consumers, is actually more realistic. Yes there is extra work on part of state/business to open their data to us. But it's worth it. The more advanced the society, the more coordination it needs to achieve the right cooperation-competition balance in the interactions between ever greater numbers of people.
There is an old book "Data For the People" by an early AI pioneer and Amazon CTO Andreas Weigend. Afaics it well describes the world we live in, and also are likely to live even more in the future.
If not, why?
Within the UK NHS and UK private hospital care, these are my personal experiences.
1) Can't email my GP to pass information back-and-forth. GP withholds their email contact, I can't email them e.g. pictures of scans, or lab work reports. In theory they should have those already on their side. In practice they rarely do. The exchange of information goes sms->web link->web form->submit - for one single turn. There will be multiple turns. Most people just give up.
2) MRI scan private hospital made me jump 10 hops before sending me link, so I can download my MRI scans videos and pictures. Most people would have given up. There were several forks in the process where in retrospect could have delayed data DL even more.
3) Blood tests scheduling can't tell me back that scheduled blood test for a date failed. Apparently it's between too much to impossible for them to have my email address on record, and email me back that the test was scheduled, or the scheduling failed. And that I should re-run the process.
4) I would like to volunteer my data to benefit R&D in the NHS. I'm a user of medicinal services. I'm cognisant that all those are helping, but the process of establishing them relied on people unknown to me sharing very sensitive personal information. If it wasn't for those unknown to me people, I would be way worse off. I'd like to do the same, and be able to tell UK NHS "here are, my lab works reports, 100 GB of my DNA paid for by myself, my medical histories - take them all in, use them as you please."
In all cases vague mutterings of "data protection... GDPR..." have been relayed back as "reasons". I take it's mostly B/S. Yes there are obstacles, but the staff could work around if they wanted to. However there is a kernel of truth - it's easier for them to not try to share, it's less work and less risk, so the laws are used as a cover leaf. (in the worst case - an alibi for laziness.)
About myself personally - my Name Surname is googleable, I'm on the open electoral register, so my address is not a secret, my company information is also open in the companies register, I have a a personal website I have put up willingly and share information about myself there. Training models on my data doesn't seem riskier than that.
Yeah, I know I'd be safer if I was completely dark, opaque to the world. I like the openness though. I also think my life has been enriched in infinitely many ways by people sharing parts of their lives via their data with me. So it would be mildly sociopathic of me, if I didn't do similar back to the world, to some extent.
Boundaries - yes sure they exist. I don't have my photo albums open to the world. I don't share info about family and friends - I know people by default don't want to share information about them, and I try to respect that. Don't share anything on Facebook, where plenty share, for example.
At the same time, I find obstacles to data sharing codified in the UK law frustrating. With the UK NHS. 1) Can't email my GP to pass information back-and-forth - GP withholds their email contact; 2) MRI scan private hospital makes me jump 10 hops before sharing my data with me; 3) Blood tests scheduling can't tell me back that schedule for a date failed, apparently it's too much for them to have my email address on record; 4) Can't volunteer my data to benefit R&D in NHS. ("here are - my lab works reports, 100 GB of my DNA paid for by myself, my medical histories - take them all in, use them as you please...") In all cases vague mutterings of "data protection... GDPR..." have been relayed back as "reasons". I take it's mostly B/S. They could work around if they wanted to. But there is a kernel of truth - it's easier for them to not try share, so it's used as a cover leaf. (in the worst case - an alibi for laziness.)
I'm for having power to share, or not share, what I want. With Google - I do want them to know about myself and use that for my (and theirs) benefit. With the UK gov (trying to break encryption) - I don't want them to be able to read my WhatsApp-s. I detest UK gov for effectively forcing me (by forcing the online pharmacy) to take a photos of myself (face, figure) in order to buy online Wegovy earlier today.
For UK - I'm reasonably sure some people will have died because of the difficulties sharing their data, that would not have died otherwise. "Otherwise" being - they could communicate with the NHS, share their data, similarly via email, WhatsApp etc, to how they communicate and share data in their private and professional lives.
People at personal level have a fairly reasonable stance, in how they behave, when it comes to sharing their data. They are surprisingly subtle in their cost-benefit analysis. It's only when they answer surveys, or talk in public, that they are less-than-entirely-truthful. We know this, b/c their revealed preferences are at odds with what they say they value, and how much they value.
What? I think you're exactly the kind of person that companies pay attention to, and why they pull moves like this
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/08/palantir-...
Most people do want to deny their data, as we have recently seen in various DOGE backlashes.
Do you lock your front door, or use passwords on any of your accounts? Because what you're essentially saying is that you're OK with strangers having access to your personal information. That's beyond the already flawed "I have nothing to hide" argument.
In trusted neighborhoods? No. But that respect goes both ways.
Abuse of medical data is just the tip of the iceberg here and, at least in the states, privatized healthcare presents all sorts of for-profit pricing abuse scenarios let alone nasty scenarios for social coercion.
> The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
Oh boy. Did you somehow miss all the news about data leaks and password dumps etc. being sold on the "dark" web and shit?
Would you mind if I followed you around and noted everything you do and constantly demanded your attention?
The shit done by corporations is akin to a clingy stalker and would be absolutely despised if it was an individual person doing something like that.
As for benefits, which?? In my entire life I have never seen an ad for anything (that I did not already know about via other means) that made me want to look up the product, let alone buy it. Nor do I know anyone who did. In fact, it turns me off from a product if its ad appears too frequently.
Google etc. and various storefronts also almost never recommend me anything that actually matches my interests, beyond just a shallow word similarity, in fact they forcibly shove completely unrelated shit into my searches cause they were paid to. Like searching for RPGs and seeing Candy f'ing Crush.
----
You know what though, I kinda agree with the potential intent behind your charade:
Yes, LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT ME.
I will gladly TELL companies EXACTLY what I like, and I WANT you to use that. Show me other shit that is actually relevant to MY interests instead of the interests of whomever paid you to shove their shit into my face.
ASK! DON'T SPY! Because you can't ever get it right anyway!
I think that it is only a matter of time before they will start reselling these data as exfiltrated IP to whoever will be interested.
I realize there's a whole legal quagmire here involved with intellectual "property" and what counts as "derivative work", but that's a whole separate (and dubiously useful) part of the law.
If you can use all of the content of stack overflow to create a “derivative work” that replaces stack overflow, and causes it to lose tons of revenue, is it really a derivative work?
I’m pretty sure solution sites like chegg don’t include the actual questions for that reason. The solutions to the questions are derivative, but the questions aren’t.
Privacy makes sense, treating data like property does not.
The users did provide the data, which is a good point. But there’s a reason SO was so useful to developers and quora was not. It also made it a perfect feeding ground for hungry LLMs.
Then again I’m just guessing that big models are trained on SO. Maybe that’s not true
(and as diggan said, the web isn't the only source they use anyway. who knows what they're buying from data brokers.)
AI companies will get bailed out like the auto industry was - they won't be hurt at all.
It’s quite clear. It’s easy to opt out. They’re making everyone go through it.
It doesn’t reach your threshold of having everyone sign a contract or something, but then again no other online service makes people sign contracts.
> should be considered a serious criminal offense.
On what grounds? They’re showing people the terms. It’s clear enough. People have to accept the terms. We’ve all been accepting terms for software and signing up for things online for decades.
And when talking specifically about AI, one could argue that learning from interactions is a common aspect of intelligence, so a casual user who do not understand details about LLMs would expect so anyways. Also, the fact that LLMs (and other neural networks) have distinct training and inference phases seems more like an implementation detail.
After providing consent, the setting will be turned on by default. [1]
[1]: https://support.docusign.com/s/document-item?language=en_US&...
I'll use Claude with my employer's Copilot account, but was I wasn't putting anything personal there anyway.
Time to learn how to do local models...
I'm not arguing on the facts of the modal design, I don't remember either way, I just don't remember it being confusing.
Unless I was in some A B test?
To put it in perspective: google won't even give you an option to opt out.
If you pay for Gemini as a private user and not as a corporation, you are fair game for google.
Now, neither option is good. But one is still much worse.
If not, you should mask your personal info before you sent it to Anthropic (or OpenAI, Google).
Use this maybe - https://github.com/deepanwadhwa/zink#shielding-llm-and-api-c...
I think Claude saw that OpenAI was reaping too much benefit from this so they decided to do it too.
Corporate surveillance is government surveillance. Always has been.
Well, probably easier than you think. Given that it looks like Palantir is able to control the software and hardware of the new fangled detention centers with immunity, how difficult do you think it is for them to disappear someone without any accountability?
It is precisely the blurring of the line between gov and private companies that aid in subverting the rule of law in many instances.
[0] https://thegrayzone.com/2025/06/18/palantir-execs-appointed-...
But the question was "why trust a company and not the government?"
So even now it's between:
* A company who, if big enough and in a key position, could theoretically do this
* A government who we know for sure have grabbed multiple people off the streets, within the past month, and have trafficked them out of the country without any due process.
The post you were replying to simply said the behavior of this administration made them care more about this issue, not that they trusted companies more than the government. That statement is not even implied in anyway in the comment you responded to?
The fact is whereas in the past it would be expected that the government could regulate the brutal and illegal overreaches of private companies, giving military rank to private companies execs makes that even less likely. The original comment is alluding to a simpler point: A government that gives blank checks to private companies in military and security matters is much worse than one that doesn't.
I'll still take an increasingly stacked US federal court that still has to pay lip service to the constitution over private arbitration hired by the company accountable only to their whims.
What you mentioned has been repeatedly ruled unconstitutional, but the administration is ignoring the courts.
There's tradeoffs. The government, at least, has to abide by the constitution. Companies don't have to abide by jack shit.
That means infinite censorship, searches and seizures, discrimination, you name it.
We have SOME protection. Very few, but they're there. But if Uber was charging black people 0.50 cents more on average because their pricing model has some biases baked in, would anyone do anything?
If they were charging wealthy people 0.50 more on average because the model showed that they don't care about price that much, they would be fine.
No: because Uber doesn't have to tell you how their model works and they probably don't even know.
It seems strange to not be able to grasp the difference in kind here.
Why do you think the military and police outsource fucking everything to the private sector? Because there are no rules there.
Wanna make the brown people killer 5000 drone? Sure, go ahead. Wanna make a facial crime recognition system that treats all black faces as essentially the same? Sure, go ahead. Wanna run mass censorship and propaganda campaigns? Sure, go ahead.
The private sector does not abide by the constitution.
Look, stamping out a protest and rolling tanks is hard. Its gonna get on the news, it's gonna be challenged in court, the constitution exists, it's just a whole thing.
Just ask Meta to do it. Probably more effective anyway.
What happens the same company locks all your book drafts because an algorithm deemed that you're plotting something against someone?
Both are real events, BTW.
The government forces me to do business with them; if I don't pay them tens (and others hundreds) of thousands of dollars every year they will send people with guns to imprison me and eventually other people with guns to seize my property.
Me willingly giving Google some data and them capriciously deciding to not always give it back doesn't seem anything like the same to me. (It doesn't mean I like what Google's doing, but they have nowhere near the power of the group that legally owns and uses tanks.)
A company "applied what the law said", and refused that they made a mistake and overreached. Which is generally attributed to governments.
So, I you missed the effects of this little binary flag on their life.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-cs...
What?! Google locked them out of Google. I'm sure they can still get search, email, and cloud services from many other providers.
The government can lock you away in a way that is far more impactful and much closer to "life stopped; locked out of everything" than "you can't have the data you gave us back".
Apple/FBI story in question: https://apnews.com/general-news-c8469b05ac1b4092b7690d36f340...
On the other hand, what Apple did is a tangible thing and is a result.
This gives them better optics for now, but there is no law says that they can't change.
Their business model is being an "accessible luxury brand with the privacy guarantee of Switzerland as the laws allow". So, as another argument, they have to do this.
That's why the usual ethos in places like HN of treating any doubt about government actions as lowbrow paranoid conspiracy theory stuff, is so exasperating, for those of us who came from either the former soviet bloc or third world nations.
The part that irks me is that this includes people who are literally paying for the service.
https://www.anthropic.com/news/updates-to-our-consumer-terms
These bastard companies pirated the world's data, then they train on our personal data. But they have the gall to say we can't save their model's inputs and outputs and distill their models.
While those developers are not well paid (usually around 30/40 USD hour, no benefits), you need a lot of then, so, it is a big temptation to create also as much synthetic data sets from your more capable competitor.
Given the fact that AI companies have this Jihad zeal to achieve their goals no matter what (like, fuck copyright, fuck the environment, etc, etc), it would be naive to believe they don't at least try to do it.
And even if they don't do it directly, their outsourced developers will do it indirectly by using AI to help with their tasks.
$40/hour for a full time would put you just over the median household income for the US.
I suspect this provides quite a good living for their family and the devs doing the work feel like they’re well-paid.
For comparison, I live in a place that is typically considered as tier 3 or 4 out of 4 in the US by employers (4 being the cheapest). Costs of living are honestly more like tier 2 cities, but it’s a small city in a poor state. 7 years ago, the going rate for an unlicensed handyman was $32/hour, often paid under the table in cash (I don’t have more recent numbers because I find DIY better and easier than hiring someone reliable).
We need a Galoob vs. Nintendo [1], Sony vs. Universal [2], or whatever that TiVo case was (I don't think it was TiVo vs. EchoStar). A case that establishes anyone can scrape and distill models.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Galoob_Toys,_Inc._v._Nin....
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive....
Having "Accept" right under that makes it very unclear what you're accepting and enabling/disabling at the same time.
For those without an account or just want to see this: https://imgur.com/a/jbhzbnB
The solution is to break up monopolies....
As the years go by, I'm finding myself being able to rely on those less and less, because every time I do, I eventually get disappointed by them working against their user base.
For me this been a pretty fundamental shift, where before I either had to figure out another way so I can move on, or had to spend weeks writing one function after learning the needed math, and now it can take me 10-30 minutes to nail perfectly.
An LLM can give you a hazy picture, but it's your job to focus it.
That I don't know, and probably no one else, way too early to tell. I only responded to a comment stating "LLMs aren't a fundamental or core technology, they're an amusing party trick", which obviously I disagree with as for me they've been a fundamental shift in what I'm able to do.
> From the energy consumption impact on climate change alone I would say the answer is clearly no.
Ok, I guess that's fair enough. So if someone happens to use local models at home, in a home that is powered by solar power, then you'd feel LLM starting to be a net positive for humanity?
> And tons of other issues like how Big Tech is behaving.
This is such a big thing in general (that I agree with) but it has nothing to do with LLMs as a technology. Big Tech acts like they own the world and can do whatever they want with it, regardless if there are LLMs or not, so not sure why anyone would expect anything else.
Sure, that would make a difference, but it's not gonna happen anytime soon, other than hacker hobbyists, because no one is making money off of that.
> This is such a big thing in general (that I agree with) but it has nothing to do with LLMs as a technology.
Correct -- I don't have any issue with the technology itself, but rather how the technology is implemented and used, and the resources put towards its use. And BigTech are putting hundreds of $B into this -- for what end exactly besides potentially making tons of money off of consumer subscribers or ads a-la-Meta or Google? If BigTech was putting the same amount of money into technology that could actually benefit humanity (you know, like actually saving the world from potential future destruction by climate change), I'd have a much kinder view of them.
Just think about the type of code these things are trained on and the fact you’re clearly some random non-specialist.
That's just a misunderstanding, I'm not "vibing" anything. The tests are written by me, the API interfaces are written by me, the usages are written by me, and the implementation of these functions are written by an LLM, but reviewed to be up to code standards/quality by me.
If a function gives me the right output for the inputs I have in mind, does anything beyond that really matter?
seriously, the idea we need this is a joke. people need it to pretend they can do their job. the rest of us enjoy having quick help from it. and we have done without it for a very long time already..
I can understand becoming reliant on a technology -- I expect most programmers today would be pretty lost with punch cards or line editors -- but LLM coding seems too new for true reliance to have formed yet...?
I don't think we should be so quick to dismiss the holes LLMs are fulfilling as unnecessary. The only thing "necessary" is food water and shelter by some measures.
I am expecting AI companies to start using ads, it's inevitable as they need to make money at some point and $20 a month won't do it.
For ads the number of users is the main thing - the more users you have the bigger the market and more money you could earn. Google desperately needs to be in this space, that's why they are throwing a ton of money on AI.
Anthropic probably has 80% of AI coding model market share. That's a trillion dollar market.
not if you have to constantly expend enormous sums to stay ahead of your competition or otherwise you lose your edge. It's not the best coding model because they got some mystical treasure in their basement. It's so rapidly becoming a commodity that at some point Microsoft or Google will just offer just as good a model for free and like search they'll just start milking people with ads.
That's likely one of the reasons for the shifting privacy stances, not just for training but because monetization of the product itself is probably looking pretty dim in the long run.
That doesn't matter when their revenue per user is as high as it is.
They're at $5B ARR and rapidly growing.
This is already happening.
> Wait until smart glasses or watches with AI overtake cellphones
Smartphones are crystalized perfection. It's such a peak design. The size, form factor, sensors, input/output modalities, and generalization are perfect. The reason companies are trying to supplant it is that they need to get out from under Google and Apple's control. It's not that anything is wrong with the smartphone.
VR has a long way to go in terms of hardware problems.
XR/AR is ridiculous. It's creepy, unstylish, and the utility is highly questionable. Nobody is going to want to be a walking ad.
Time will tell, but to me they feel like desktops did 20 years ago. The process of enshitification has turned simple tasks complicated and everyone wants a different, privacy destroying, frustrating to use "app", each of which has a slightly different UI paradigm, a mandatory subscription I've forgotten to cancel for two years straight, and a confusing name to remember. I now have something like 90 apps installed on my iphone, and I can only remember what something like 40 of them do. My damn cat box has an app, and instead of naming it something sensible like "Shitbox 2000" they named it "Whisker".
Was it "Foober Eats that had taco bell, or Instafart, maybe it was Dine-N-Dash? Where's the back button on this thing and why is it different from every other app? Is this an ad or content, does it even matter anymore? Why do I need another login, what happened to SSO? Why won't my password vault work for this one app? Did I register for this one with my google account or apple? Who took my pills? Stay off my lawn!"
When the day comes that I can just tell my device what to do, and let it get it done I'll be very happy to dump that cognitive load onto someone/something else.
This is because apps were never allowed to be installed like desktop software or as easy to access as websites. Developers had to cram in as much as possible and take as many permissions as possible because of how difficult Apple and Google made it.
If you could just search the web for an app, click a link, and have it instantly start working natively (sandboxed, with permissions), the world would be an amazing place.
Once they admitted they are going to have to take money from folks who chop up journalists that made them feel sad, they proved the current pre token LLM based business model doesn't work. They haven't pulled the ads lever yet but the writing is on the wall.
Which means sadly only business with other revenue streams like M$, the Google, or Amazon can really afford it long term. I'm was rooting for Anthropic but it doesn't look good.
Merely selling data is extremely low value compared to also having the surface monopoly to monetize it in a very high engagement and decisioning space.
I feel like you don’t understand the fundamental mechanics of the ad world. Ultimately, the big 4 own such immense decisions surface area it may be a while before any AI model company can create a product the get there.
That was true when the tech leadership was an open question and it seemed like any one of the big players could make a breakthrough at any moment that would propel them to the top. Nowadays it has pattered out and the market is all about sustainable user growth. In that sense Anthropic is pretty overvalued, at least if you think that OpenAI's valuation is legit. And if you think OpenAI is overvalued, then Anthropic would be a no-go zone as an investor.
And the underrated comparison was more towards the fact that I couldn't believe scaleAi's questionable accquisition by facebook and I still remember the conversation me and my brother were having which was, why doesn't facebook pay 2x, 3x the price of anthropic but buy anthropic instead of scaleAI itself
well I think the answer my brother told was that meta could buy it but anthropic is just not selling it
> If you’re an existing user, you have until September 28, 2025 to accept the updated Consumer Terms and make your decision. If you choose to accept the new policies now, they will go into effect immediately. These updates will apply only to new or resumed chats and coding sessions. After September 28, you’ll need to make your selection on the model training setting in order to continue using Claude. You can change your choice in your Privacy Settings at any time.
Doesn’t say clearly it applies to all the prompts from the past.
https://www.anthropic.com/news/updates-to-our-consumer-terms
> Previous chats with no additional activity will not be used for model training.
https://www.anthropic.com/news/updates-to-our-consumer-terms
Meta downloaded copyrighted content and trained their models on it, OpenAI did the same.
Uber developed Greyball to cheat the officials and break the law.
Tesla deletes accident data and reports to the authorities they don't have it.
So forgive me I have zero trust in whatever these companies say.
If your threat model is to unconditionally not trust the companies, what they're saying is irrelevant. Which is fair enough, you probably should not be using a service you don't trust at all. But there's not much of a discussion to be had when you can just assert that everything they say is a lie.
> Meta downloaded copyrighted content and trained their models on it, OpenAI did the same.
> Uber developed Greyball to cheat the officials and break the law.
These seem like randomly chosen generic grievances, not examples of companies making promises in their privacy policy (or similar) and breaking them. Am I missing some connection?
Where did these companies claim they didn’t do this?
Even websites can be covered by copyright. It has always been known that they trained on copyrighted content. The output is considered derivative and therefore it’s not illegal.
If you don’t take companies at their word, you need to be consistent about it.
None. And even if it's the nicest goody two shoes company in the history of capitalism, the NSA will have your data and then there'll be a breach and then Russian cyber criminals will have it too.
At this point I'm with you on the zero trust: we should be shouting loud and clear to everyone, if you put data into a web browser or app, that data will at some point be sold for profit without any say so from you.
I don't own a car and only take public transit or bike. I fill my transit card with cash. I buy food in cash from the farmer's morning market. My tv isn't connected to the Internet, it's connected to a raspberry pi which is connected to my home lab running jellyfin and a YouTube archiving software. I de Googled and use an old used phone and foss apps.
It's all happened so gradually I didn't even realize how far I'd gone!
It's an AI company, why wouldn't they use the most precious data they have?
1. Anthropic reverses privacy stance, will train on Claude chats
3. Gun Maker Sig Sauer Citing National Security to Keep Documents from Public
4. Tesla said it didn't have key data in a fatal crash. Then a hacker found it
6. Meta might be secretly scanning your phone's camera roll
7. If you have a Claude account, they're going to train on your data moving forward
8. Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?
It has always been like this. Sites like Reddit, HN, and Digg and Boing Boing (when they were more popular) have always had a lot of stories under the category of online rights, privacy, and anger at big companies.
What if the first layer (or couple layers) were processed locally on the users machine and then it goes to the provider to process the remaining layers.
You could also process the last layer on the users machine.
It’s hard to say what kind of privacy this gives users. I don’t think they could reverse out exactly what the input was.
Combine that workflow with homomorphic encryption and you've got a reasonable privacy moat.
As long as they’re up front about it, it seems ok. Maybe providing a privacy toggle would be good.
It’s also good as it forces corporations to invest in offline LLM’s which is better for everyone.
I genuinely want to know and would like to have a productive conversation. I would like to identify what made people trust them and not realise they’re the same as every other.
I don’t think there’ll be many (if any) who think this should’ve happened, but I do expect some may be surprised (and disappointed).
That is an interesting claim. What makes you believe that? And does this announcement shake that belief in any way?
> Their aesthetic is cool modern valley vibes.
Does looking cool equal being trustworthy? Doesn’t feel like it should. On the contrary, from observation on HN it seems the websites which look pretty bare bones (none from an LLM company) tend to be perceived as more trustworthy (i.e. “this hacker cares about The Thing™, not trying to sell you a product”).
> pure souled silicon valley.
Could you expand on what this means?
There's no such thing as a free lunch, but even when I am a paying customer my data is taken as gratuity and used (+ spread around!) in extremely opaque ways. I am tired of it. Honestly, I'm just getting tired of the internet.
To make it respect user privacy I would use this data for training preference models, and those preference models used to finetune the base model. So the base model never sees particular user data, instead it learns to spot good and bad approaches from feedback experience. It might be also an answer to "who would write new things online if AI can just replicate it?" - the experience of human-AI work can be recycled directly through the AI model. Maybe it will speed up progress, amplifying both exploration of problems and exploitation of good ideas.
Considering OpenAI has 700M users, and worldwide there are probably over 1B users, they generate probably over 1 trillion tokens per day. Those collect in 2 places - in chat logs, for new models, and in human brains. We ingest a trillion AI tokens a day, changing how we think and work.
I use both Mac and Windows (Work / Leisure) and in both boxes I had a weird dialog appearing with no text at all in either.
I can confirm the dark pattern switch (As in dark grey / light gray status)
And this is only for free users, paid users should never have to think about this.
The cognitive load to remember to opt out every new chat should not rest on the user.
Everyone is so cynical these days.
I am wondering how would you use a chat transcript for training? Unless it is massive, possibly private codebases that are constantly getting piped into Claude Code right now. In that case, that would make sense.
But more importantly (to me) is storing 5 years worth of other company's IP. That just seems wildly risky for all parties unless I really don't understand how Claude Code works.
This type of behavior has a penalty, that penalty is trust. You lost it.
If I'm not paying for something, I presume this is the kind of thing that's happening, so this isn't newsworthy to me. Is it also applicable for paid and paid corporate accounts?
An Effective Altruism ethos provides moral/ethical cover for trampling individual privacy and property rights. Consider their recent decision to provide services for military projects.
As others have pointed out, Claude was trained using data expressly forbidden for commercial reuse.
The only feedback Anthropic will heed is financial and the impact must be large enough to destroy their investors willingness to cover the losses. This type of financial feedback can come from three places: termination of a large fraction of their b2b contracts, software devs organizing a persistent mass migration to an open source model for software development. Neither of these are likely to happen in the next 3 months. Finally, a mass filing of data deletion requests from California and EU residents and corporations that repeats every week.
I have a really hard time thinking that Google, Microsoft, Meta, etc... would _not_ train on whatever people enter (willingly or not in the system.)
The silver lining is that what most people enter in a chat box is _utter crap_.
So, training on that would make the "Artificial Intelligence" system less and less intelligent - unless the devs find a way to automagically sort clever things from stupid things, in which case I want to buy _that_ product.
In the long run, LLMs dev are going to have to either:
* refrain from getting high on their own supply, and find a way to tag AI generated content
* or sort the bs from the truth, probably reinventing "trust in gatekeepers and favoring sources of truth with a track record" and copying social pressure, etc... until we have a "pulitzer price" and "academy awards" for most relevant AI sources with a higher sticker price, to separate from cheap slop.
That, or "2+2=7 because DeepChatGrokmini said so, and if you don't agree you're a terrorist, and if our AI math breaks your rocket it's your fault."
Actually up until a few months ago I swore I just couldn't use these hosted models (I regularly use local inference but like most my local hardware yields only so much quality). Tech companies, nay many companies, will lie and cheat to squeeze out whatever they can. That includes reneging promises.
With data privacy specifically I always take the default stance that they are collecting from me. In order for me to use their product it has to be /exceedingly/ good to be worth the trade off.
Turns out that Claude Code is just that damn good. I started using it for my own personal project. But the impetus was the culmination of months questioning what kind of data I'd be okay with giving up to a hosted model.
What I'm trying to say is that this announcement doesn't bother me that much because I already went on my own philosophical odyssey to prepare for this breach of trust to occur.
In this aspect, it would've been great to give us an incentive – a discount, a donation on our behalf, plant a percent of a tree or just beg / ask nicely, explain what's in it for us.
Regarding privacy, our conversations are saved anyway, so if it would be a breach this wouldn't make much of a difference, would it?
My reasoning: I use AI for development work (Claude Code), and better models = fewer wasted tokens = less compute = less environmental impact. This isn't a privacy issue for work context.
I regularly run concurrent AI tasks for planning, coding, testing - easily hundreds of requests per session. If training on that interaction data helps future models be more efficient and accurate, everyone wins.
The real problem isn't privacy invasion - it's AI velocity dumping cognitive tax on human reviewers. I'd rather have models that learned from real usage patterns and got better at being precise on the first try, instead of confidently verbose slop that wastes reviewer time.
Looks like there is an opt out option. Curious about the EU users - would that be off by default (so: opt in)?
As some other user put it: "big corp changes policy and breaks promises, how shocking"
Also it seems that this data retention/training does not apply to the API.
I think both Anthropic and OpenAI do not train on enterprise data, so an enterprise account maybe.
https://help.mistral.ai/en/articles/347617-do-you-use-my-use...
I hate this shit and I'm cancelling now.
but the "Accept" and "Not Now" are for the new terms of use.
So by toggling off and clicking "Accept", it will accept the toggled version. You can check the setting after accepting it at: https://claude.ai/settings/data-privacy-controls It's the "Help Improve Claude" button.
in fact, i haven’t agreed to it yet, and was able to close the popup and continue using Claude. they also made it extremely clear how to opt out, providing the switch right in the popup and reminding me it’s also in settings.
when i eventually do have to agree to the ToS changes, i’ll probably just stay opted out.
Collecting user data should be a liability, not a enormously profitable endeavor.
"Anthropic also reported discovering North Korean operatives using Claude to fraudulently obtain remote employment positions at Fortune 500 technology companies, leveraging the AI to pass technical interviews and maintain positions despite lacking basic coding skills."
Note that in this version the North Koreans lack basic coding skills, which took me by surprise. Generally they are assumed to be highly competent.
The original (https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-countering-misuse-a...) is completely different:
"Our Threat Intelligence report discusses several recent examples of Claude being misused, including a large-scale extortion operation using Claude Code, a fraudulent employment scheme from North Korea, and the sale of AI-generated ransomware by a cybercriminal with only basic coding skills. We also cover the steps we’ve taken to detect and counter these abuses."
This is what people are using for web search. I'm not targeting Perplexity specifically, Google "AI" summaries are just as bad.
UPDATE: The original pdf says something different again (https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/b2a76c6f6992465c09a6f2fce282f6...):
"The most striking finding is the actors’ complete dependency on AI to function in technical roles. These operators do not appear to be able to write code, debug problems, or even communicate professionally without Claude’s assistance. Yet they’re successfully maintaining employment at Fortune 500 companies (according to public reporting) passing technical interviews, and delivering work that satisfies their employers. This represents a new paradigm where technical competence is simulated rather than possessed."
This should be distributed among managers so that they finally get the truth about "AI".
For example Anthropic have an Anthropic Console that they appear to consider quite distinct from Claude.ai. Do these share a privacy policy and related settings? How do either of these fit in with the named plans like Pro and Max? What are you actually paying for when you give them money for the various different things they charge for? Is all API use under their Commercial Terms even if it's a personal account that is otherwise under the Consumer Terms? Why isn't all of this obvious and transparent to users?
OpenAI don't seem to be any better. I only just learned from this HN discussion that they train on personal account conversations. As someone privacy-conscious who has used ChatGPT - even if only a few times for experiments - I find the fact that this wasn't very clearly stated up front to be extremely disturbing. If I'd known about it I would certainly have switched off the relevant setting immediately.
I get that these organisations have form for training on whatever they can get their hands on whether dubiously legal or not. But training on users' personal conversations or code feels like something that should require a very clear and explicit opt-in. In fact I don't see how they can legally not have that first in places like the EU and UK that have significant data protection legislation.
In future news:
- Anthropic reverses stance on token limits, all plans cost double and limits are halved
- Anthropic introduces ad mode
- Anthropic partners with Palantir to deliver democracy at scale
This is getting to be more and more hilarious each day.
The bubble is deflating/popping. The MIT study has really dampened the excitement on AI.
TBH, I'd love to have a model which was specifically trained on conversation which I had with an earlier iteration. That would make it adapt to me and be less frustrating. Right now I'm relying only on instruction files to somewhat tune a model to my needs.