Nvidia, Palantir, and others restrict advanced AI model usage over privacy concerns, report claims — 'paranoia' rising over customer intellectual property

Anthropic and OpenAI are both facing uncomfortable questions from some large AI customers over concerns about how proprietary data may be used to train AI models. Some companies are so worried that they have begun demanding assurances about how their data is handled or going so far as to place limitations on which models their employees can use, and for which tasks, The Information reports. They fear that models may be trained on their intellectual property and information.

The issue can be traced back to a June change by Anthropic. Following the change to its flagship Fable model's policies, Anthropic can now retain customer data. The company argues that it only does so to ensure that Fable isn't being misused. But some companies have raised concerns that it means sensitive business data will be caught up in the sweep.

While both OpenAI and Anthropic point out that they don't train their models on the information given to them by companies with specific enterprise contracts by default, that doesn't tell the full story. Both companies do collect metadata from the same corporate customers, and while information on exactly what that metadata contains is hard to come by, OpenAI notes that it's only used “to better understand how our services are used." Anthropic also argues that any data it collects about how customers use its products is aggregated and anonymized. And that metadata isn't used to train models.