I pretty sure OpenAI and Anthropic are doing the same or worse. Keep in mind that these companies are in the business of stealing IP work and reselling it to you with "safety checks" so asking if they use your usage data for training is a bit naive at best. At least the Chinese companies are more open and give back to the community compared with the "frontier" providers.
> I pretty sure OpenAI and Anthropic are doing the same or worse.
No they're not. It would end both companies if they were ever found to be doing that.
Their terms are clear - if you use the coding plans they can[0] train in return. Enterprise and API, absolutely not.
The argument here is that with the Chinese labs you have zero legal recourse.
[0] opt-in, thanks
I would think they are not but Alex Karp CEO of Palantir seems to imply that they are:
https://youtu.be/0A3sGymV6kY?si=ti7uSZtYqJ3vKpGM
I found it a little shocking TBH
>> No they're not. It would end both companies if they were ever found to be doing that. Their terms are clear - The argument here is that with the Chinese labs you have zero legal recourse.
Their terms are not worth shit considering they are reselling you stolen copyrighted data. Even in they terms they started clearly say they retain your data for "safety reasons" for however long they want. Perhaps you didn't watch the space with Anthropic going back and forth with ToS updates(we retain your data for 30 days...stike that and add 30 days or more or no or ..whatever) like my own alpha website.
> Even in they terms they started clearly say they retain your data for "safety reasons" for however long they want.
The discussion was about training, not data retention. Two very different concerns.
And if you're a decent sized customer, most providers have a route to not even retaining the data for safety/security reasons. The reason Anthropic had issues is because they do have a path to "no data storage" for Sonnet/Opus, but not for Fable. Which is why at work we have access to the former, but not the latter.
There is an enormous difference between:
* Exploiting ambiguity around fair use at a large scale before the law catches up and then jointly lobbying with your competition to make sure your interpretation of the law becomes reality.
* Explicitly signing a contract with enterprises to respect their IP and then proceeding to break that contract with your own customers.
The former is firmly in the gray area of legality and doesn't directly hurt your own customers. The latter is both an unambiguous contract violation and a flagrant attack on your own customers' most valuable asset.
https://www.anthropic.com/legal/privacy
> Personal data we collect or receive to train our models
> • Data that our users or crowd workers provide, including Inputs and Outputs from our Services (unless users opt out)
> • Feedback that users explicitly provide about our Services
> • Materials flagged for safety, security, or policy review
While I don’t have visibility into individual corp contracts, hitting tab on a FIM is ‘feedback’, so it is not so clear cut.
retention for 'safety' -> AI race as national security -> training on your data for 'national security' aka safety
It's simple mental calisthenics. If you are handing an organization whose entire business model is built on stealing data with spurious reasoning, what do you actually expect they will do? Don't be a fool.
I'd like to see you try using mental calisthenics against a well-funded legal department. Let me know what the judge says.
Anthropic paid a large settlement for the copyrighted data they pirated. So far, US courts have found that it's perfectly fine to train AIs on copyrighted data for which you have legal access.
> if you use the coding plans they train in return.
No, you have to opt-in to that. There's a privacy toggle on account settings.
Are we talking about the company sending back private information through its client to « fight » model distillation?
Yes.
Enterprise contracts are checked and agreed by lawyers. The contract states no training.
If the provider fucks up, there are actual monetary damages defined for breach of contract.
It's an unenforceable clause. The affected party has no means to prove that a breach has happened.
Anthropic constantly uses dark patterns to steal training data from customers (like the “how is claude doing” spam, data retention loosening when the safeguards false positive, etc).
How is that a dark pattern? What is the light pattern for getting feedback from users?
they train on your requests by paraphrasing them (which means rewriting them but keeping all the saliency) and removing their association with you
i don't know why this is so controversial, their terms are written to perfectly fit this training regime
if you are using bedrock, until very recently, they didn't see your requests and could not paraphrase. but too many people were using bedrock for too much stuff they wanted to see. so that's why the terms for bedrock changed for fable 5. this was the core of the palantir / defense dept drama with anthropic.
lmao, wasn't xAI caught doing this recently? moreover at least moonshot is being honest about it.
There is a world of difference between:
* A company following suit with their entire industry in choosing a very generous definition of fair use.
* A company being the first to defect and actually break their signed contracts with enormous enterprises committing to not train on those enterprises' most valuable assets.
Training on copyrighted works signs them up to be a part of a system that is at this point too big to fail and places them in good company with all of their competition. Breaking their signed agreements would open them up to very well-founded and well-funded lawsuits for contract violation and give their competition a huge boost.
All of a sudden "we actually don't break our contracts" would be a selling point. No company in their right mind is going to let what should be table stakes become a differentiator for their competition.
>> I pretty sure OpenAI and Anthropic are doing the same or worse.
So in your opinion, they are training on your data even if you toggle the "don't train on my data" checkbox off?
That's a bold assertion.
Not the guy you responded to, but I would assume ”they keep it safe” somewhere in a cold storage. Just in case they decide to train on it in a later phase.
Think of it as the Big Data hype some years ago.
I don't think they'd really be willing to risk the whole company on a small subset of prompts. It's not "keeping it safe", it's retaining proof of illegal activities.
Yes, their entire existence relies on training on copyrighted content without permission being ok.
You truly see no difference between having a perhaps-overly-generous definition of fair use and flagrantly breaking contracts that you signed with your customers?
Why wouldn't they?
Because the legal system does, in fact, have teeth. And those teeth actually deploy pretty readily. Especially when the people whose trade secrets you would be violating are gargantuan companies with enough resources that the cost of a lawsuit is a rounding error.
First it has to discover a violation.
Yeah but a disgruntled employee would talk sooner or later.
You mean like Suchir Balaji?
no it doesn't. If it would have teeth they would not resell copyright data. They will be busted like Kim DotCom
No AI company has been reselling copyright data to my knowledge, it would be truly bizarre if they did that.
What they have been doing, with some narrow exceptions where they have lost billions of dollars in court cases*, is not at all obviously prohibited by copyright law. Neither web scraping (i.e. asking for copies of data from people you have every reason to believe are authorized to give you copies) or running algorithms on copyrighted data are generally copyright infringment. I say generally because the "algorithm" of "ctrl-c ctrl-v" is obviously an exception, and there's some argument that training is similar enough to be illegal - a fairly weak argument that is mostly losing in court but has some tiny chance of still succeeding.
The law doesn't have teeth to prohibit things not prohibited under the law - no matter how much many people would like them to be prohibited. This shouldn't be surprising.
Unlike with copyright, the law does pretty clearly prohibit violating contractual terms to not hang onto or use other peoples data for purposes other than the narrow ones laid out in the contract when you agreed to the contract.
* Namely acquiring copies of data from people who they know aren't authorized to make copies - i.e. torrenting.
Fair use is a defense when using copyrighted data. It is not a declaration that the data isn't copyrighted.
So they are in fact literally putting copyrighted data into the model weights and reselling it.
Pay to play teeth
To an extent, though for significant (in monetary terms) violations of the law the teeth tend to pay for themselves (but do so by not fully compensating the people whose behalf they are supposedly acting on).
More problematically there are camouflaged sharp spines pointed primarily in the direction of poorer people, and people not advised by lawyers.
But none of that matters here when the damaged parties include the megacorps of the world.
Because the value obtained from doing so is unlikely to exceed the cost of the lawsuits if they were ever caught doing so.
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