Some offer zero data retention policies, but there can be weasel words. For example, on the individual pro plan, you can turn off the setting that lets them train models on your data, but they still have a section in their terms that allows them to evaluate your anonymized data for statistical and "research" purposes. You have to actually get a signed contract along with an enterprise plan that spells out exactly what they're going to use, and what settings enable what retention.

https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/10023548-how-long-do-... (see the additional info section)

What about inference providers like Baseten, Modal, Fireworks, Together, etc? I thought one of their value propositions was inference (using open weights models) that guarantees with crisp terms that they will not use your data.

No, that is not "common knowledge". You are supposed to be able to disable that unwanted feature.

> I thought this was commonly accepted to be the case that companies which sell access to LLMs are also storing and training on the inputs?

The services have toggles to allow prompts to be used in the training set. There is a conspiracy theory that the toggle is a false distraction and they’re actually keeping everything, and that none of the employees involved will ever whistleblow this fact.

Outside of Internet comment sections, I think most people assume these US-based companies are doing what they say.

For enterprise use there are services like AWS Bedrock which have strict isolation guarantees. There are some people who still believe those guarantees are a lie, but once someone has reached that point I don’t think they trust anything that isn’t running entirely within their house. People in that category are a very small minority, but a very vocal minority.

Bedrock is really bad. It seems like they don't host the models very well because they produce tons of bugs/errors calling the model. For example you can end up with Anthropic models not returning a stop token and you end up waiting for a timeout thinking its doing something when it isn't.

Amazon is deeply invested in Anthropic and would not defame them through marketing a service whose selling point was their startup's breach of contracts.

All except Gemini which can be rather important depending on your use case.

yes this is my understanding as well, and based on [1] seems to be the case. I don't know why everyone is just believing the un-backed accusations of people probably just didn't turn off said setting (and if they did why have they not said anything to such effect)

[1] https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2097746417012166816

They already trained on pirated content, what makes you think they are going to honor ZDR?

A lot substance is hinged on the exact definition of the word "data" or "user data". In the age of post-truth everyone is claiming that they keep no "user data". Except that after running it once through some transformer program it's no longer "user data", it's something entirely else and these corpos gave ZERO promises regarding such laundered/transformed data at all, ever.

The guarantee on this is a (contractual) “trust me bro”, and a right to try to sue a multi-trillion-dollar company who will absolutely drive you into the ground with legal red tape.

If you are big enough to be able to withstand that, you’re already running (or trying to run) your own/open-weight models.

Just a thought experiment: considering training seems to be 'fair use', I wonder if they trained a tiny model to retain key info from your prompts, would mean that this would still constitute fair use, and allow them to legally claim they don't retain your data.

ZDR is based on the exact same pinky-promise as training opt-outs. There is no technical barrier to OpenAI, or whoever is running your compute, retaining your prompt after they run inference on their servers. If you don't control the hardware the model is being inferenced on, you don't control your data.

Where nothing is retained at all, allegedly.