And there's no proprietary IP in your company's app that you don't mind being sucked up into the training data?

> there's no proprietary IP in your company's app

For most app that concept is "gone".

People routinely decompile and recompose existing binaries, and if you use "obfuscation" in your app it's still a small bump.

In today's age, IP is no longer a tangible concept that gives any advantages in software. What differentiates two businesses isn't their IP, it's their relationships and their moat.

Most vendors that had protected proprietary IP are now irrelevant within their vertical. What saves them are the protection provided by patents, which is public.

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drdexebtjl 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Are you saying you don’t trust ZDR claims from inference providers?

They don’t care about your code. There’s more and better data on the public web.

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greenowl 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Isn't ZDR only the case if you "opt out" through a setting? Lots of opportunities to make a mistake here, or for the LLM provider to play games. You could be unaware of the setting. The provider could reset the setting upon subscription lapse/renewal, application update, model release, etc. A developer could accidentally use their personal subscription (w/ setting on) on a work codebase.

Also what's the timing on this setting's effectiveness? What if before you knew to "opt out" you used the agent for a refactor and your entire repo got sucked up in inference? But then you opt out the next day? Is it too late?

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kccqzy 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The mistakes you describe are only possible if the company doesn’t really think there’s proprietary IP in the codebase.

If a company really believed there’s valuable IP in code, there would at a minimum, ban laptops or ban code on laptops[0], provide and maintain a centrally managed LLM gateway[1] that handles authentication, billing and model choice, have MDM to prevent you from using your own Claude login, etc.

[0]: For example when I worked at Google, the proprietary google3 codebase cannot exist on laptops because there are no tools to download it to your laptop.

[1]: For example Claude code supports having a gateway: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/llm-gateway-connect

	▲	greenowl 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I'd wager many software startups out there would consider their code valuable IP (even if in the AI era it's not), and don't have these types of IT controls in place. Startups I worked at gave you an email account, github access to their private repos, and that was that. Heck, you don't even need to mix up a personal and business AI subscription. For the vast majority of folks one day their IDE "updated" and a bunch of AI features suddenly became available. Free, no sub needed. A dev starts using them (because, why not?) and lo and behold the company's code got shipped out in an inference call and is now scheduled to be in the next training run. Oops.

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drdexebtjl 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That’s the case with a personal subscription directly with OpenAI or Anthropic, but enterprise customers are opt-in, AFAIK.

And there are solutions around it from other providers and model routers. OpenRouter lets you explicitly say on a per-request basis you don’t want to be routed to a provider that trains on your input, for example.

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c16 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As other have mentioned, the code isn't the valuable part. But also there are alternatives now to these LLM providers.

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exe34 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The value of most companies/apps are in the relationship with the customers, so it's the database, not the code.

	▲	stwrt 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Definitely agree. Most developers could build a basic Twitter or Facebook clone. The hard part is getting the users, content, and relationships that make the product worth coming back to.

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kccqzy 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Frankly there’s more likely to be proprietary IP in the server side code than in mobile apps.

	▲	jgalt212 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		True, but shops are exposing everything to Claude or Open AI. It's akin to outsourcing all manufacturing to subcontractors in China. That was cheaper, but extremely short-sighted. Now so many products have cheap Chinese knock-offs that are nearly the same as the originals because the subcontractors made both.