> I am curious where your confidence that this is true, is coming from?

My confidence comes from working in big startups and big companies with legal teams. There's no way the entire company is going to gather all of the engineers and everyone around, have them code up a secret system to consume customer data into a secret part of the training set, and then have everyone involved keep quiet about it forever.

The whistleblowing and leaking would happen immediately. We've already seen LLM teams leak and and have people try to whistleblow over things that aren't even real, like the Google engineer who thought they had invented AGI a few years ago (lol). OpenAI had a public meltdown when the employees disagreed with Sam Altman's management style.

So my question to you is: What makes you think they would do this? How do you think they'd coordinate the teams to keep it all a secret and only hire people who would take this secret to their grave?

"There's no way the entire company is going to gather all of the engineers and everyone around, have them code up a secret system "

No, that is why I wrote

"Who would really know, if the pipelines are set up in a way, that only very few people are aware of this?" (Typo fixed)

There is no need for everyone to know. I don't know their processes, but I can think of ways to only include very few people who need to know.

The rest is just working on everything else. Some work with data, where they don't need to know where it came from, some with UI, some with scaling up, some .. they all don't need to know, that the source of DB XYZ comes from a dark source.