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▲ OpenAI seems to be silently re-enabling model training on Codex chats
105 points by user052919 2 hours ago | 34 comments

My company is pretty paranoid about leaking IP to the frontier labs through prompts, so we've all been diligent about disabling data sharing in Codex/Claude Code/etc. But yesterday my coworkers and I noticed that the setting had been silently reenabled in Codex. None of us knowingly opted back in.

You can check your settings here: https://chatgpt.com/settings/data-controls. Look for "Improve the model for everyone".

Curious if this is an isolated issue or something more widespread.

EDIT: looks like this has been noted before https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49643556

EDIT: apparently you can also turn off data sharing here: https://privacy.openai.com/policies?modal=take-control

▲monster_truck 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If your company actually cared about this they would be running their own inference instead of leaving fate to a couple of checkboxes.

▲rs999gti an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Agreed. Azure, GCP, and AWS have gated models that only exist in their infrastructures and can't dial out unless yous give them permissions to do so.

Don't use a models only company if you need enterprise level security and data protection.

▲sanex 14 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah but how expensive is that vs $20 or 100/month subs?

▲user052919 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

fair enough, but I still think it's an ethical issue for the model providers to silently reenable training after people have explicitly opted out

▲monster_truck an hour ago | parent [-]

It didn't happen to me, nobody I know seems to have experienced this. How can you prove to us that you ever toggled it off in the first place? This is a pretty serious accusation to make so blindly

▲user052919 an hour ago | parent [-]

Not an accusation! Just seems like it's happening, which is why I wanted to post this to ask if others noticed the same thing. I definitely can't prove it. If it had just been me I would have assumed I forgot to turn it off. But the fact that my coworkers noticed the same thing made it suspicious. Also the linked HN thread suggested others have seen this happening too

▲teekert 43 minutes ago | parent [-]

Fwiw I've had this happen with Mistral, I fell right in the middle of them changing from opt-in to opt-out AND removing their org-wide dial (on the Teams plan). They reversed that last decision (the org-wide dial returned) about 48 hours later, but in the process they turned all sliders for all my staff back to "on". Not sure if it was all malicious (I think not, just a very crappy move that hit our trust in them pretty bad). After some emails they ensured me they stored no data for training. But strange things happen.

▲sshah03 6 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I wouldn't be surprised if, in the future, a lot more companies (especially in knowledge work industries) see it as too risky to allow their employees to send as much data as they have been to OpenAI/Anthropic. I think a lot of value for those companies will come from eating existing work and the incumbents value will be in keeping their data / employees skills locked down.

▲cyanydeez 3 minutes ago | parent [-]

it's actually fascinating that so many corporations are just willing to give up their entire intellectual properties, real & imagined, to a third party because it might let them remove a percent of their work force. Especially when told "it can do it", and they dont fill in the "without you".

I've no doubt, Palentir's forward deployed engineers will essentially operate like the borg and turn companies into defacto subjugated properties.

▲impossiblefork 3 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Surely the solution to this kind of thing is to sue or make police report, or at least to have ones lawyers contact theirs?

▲1239715 39 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Disabling "improve the model" is one thing. Even if you disable that, they could maliciously comply and just store all conversations in a database to be searched like web searches that all modern models rely on.

Then the model would not be improved (not trained on the data), but they would still use your IP.

Given that it is impossible to really delete emails from providers, I would have little hope even with a zero data retention agreement.

▲ericskiff 35 minutes ago | parent [-]

My personal view on this is that there are enough people who need this to not be happening or who would be very happy to catch any of the major frontier model providers fibbing about it, that needles are constantly being added to the haystack and searched for in subsequent models and requests made to them.

Proof of training or RAG search on data that was private would be a huge smoking gun and would change usage habits overnight.

▲vibranium an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you really care, sign a ZDR contract with OpenAI or use Bedrock or something.

▲rglullis an hour ago | parent [-]

If you *really* care, run your own inference. Everything else is just wishful thinking and/or convenience winning over self-sovereignty.

▲apt-apt-apt-apt 30 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Or my other favorite move, the quiet new little guy in settings.

E.g. "Allow ABC to transmit, log, and track your every move? ON" Hey, when did this little guy get here!

▲slop 38 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This isn't exactly relevant, but something I like about T3 code is that they'll fix stuff quickly that anthropic or open ai mess up in their harnesses.

▲edot an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Turn on advanced account security. You should be doing this anyways (requires hardware keys). But it also locks data sharing off.

▲tom1337 an hour ago | parent [-]

Unfortunately, they are also changing that a bit:

> Thank you for using Daybreak Blue and for being part of our Trusted Access program. We are reaching out to notify you of an upcoming change to how your Daybreak Trusted Access data may be used. Daybreak use requires you to enroll in Advanced Account Security, which turns off the “improve the model for everyone” setting. However, from November 29, we may use content from Daybreak Blue sessions on personal accounts to improve our models, including to help strengthen safeguards against cyber misuse. We will use Daybreak Blue interactions for these purposes, even when the “improve the model for everyone” setting is off.

▲edot 29 minutes ago | parent [-]

Interesting. I am not in Daybreak so this isn't an issue for me right now, but points to one more reason to switch away from Closed AI and Anthropic.

▲bentt an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Don't trust this company.

▲m3kw9 13 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

mine wasn't reenabled

▲_doctor_love an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

When you think about it, it's really terrible for your training data to be sitting on your machine uningested. It ought to be centrally located. You know, for the greater good.

▲hyperbovine an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.

The quality of their software is such crap and this is probably just some vibe coding mishap. Go read the Github issues for Codex CLI for example -- robots talking past other robots. I am 99.9% certain not a single human being has a deep understanding of what is going on with the Codex app anymore.

▲noir_lord an hour ago | parent | next [-]

They do kind of have to eat their own dogfood (or at least pretend to publically), you do wonder if they'll be an interesting public example of choking on that dogfood at some point.

▲rfgplk 30 minutes ago | parent [-]

The frontier labs are entirely AI generated at this point. By entirely I mean ~100% of the code and supplementary training pipelines are AI created, with ZERO human guidance or oversight. And compare the results, look at Opus 5.5 vs the original Opus (which was human made). See the difference?

In fact, my personal prediction is that OpenAI and Anthropic will let go of all their human employees by Q1 2027.

▲tacone 19 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Malice and stupidity reinforce each other. If you find yourself unable to determine which one is causing the issue, run.

▲rfgplk 31 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

> 99.9% certain not a single human being has a deep understanding of what is going on with the Codex app anymore

Because humans actually don't have the ability to.

▲thewhitetulip an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They said that they have millions of lines of PRs merged daily

Pretty sure they don't know this has happened lol

Maybe they'll raise a new PR with 1000000 lines to revert back now that you guys leaked the information

▲spwa4 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

OpenAI is also now hiding your usage. Not accessible anymore in the menu, and /usage in the codex app now also gives a lot of stats, but the one stat you do want to know, how much limit left, is no longer there.

I'm guessing another big usage reduction is coming soon.

▲wisemanwillhear an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Mine got move out of the user menu on the lower left to just above the user menu as it's own clickable selection. The other day, I though they took the old quick view of usage away, and started going back to the settings to look. Turns out they just moved it.

▲pizza234 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Not accessible anymore in the menu, and /usage in the codex app now also gives a lot of stats

Codex shows the usage limits on /status - Claude instead does it on /usage.

▲user052919 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

fwiw I can still see my usage in the Codex app

▲rfgplk 33 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You actually _want_ OpenAI to train their models on your code. This helps future models become far more effective for your line of work.

> but IP

There is absolutely nothing novel humans can come up (yes, doesn't matter who you are) that LLMs aren't aware of.

▲CEOatMindfries 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

May be the coding agents should build a layer when they don't leak any IP, treat them like environment variables, which must be handled deterministically.