r/Anthropic • u/SoftwareEnough4711 • Aug 29 '25
Anthropic will train Claude on consumer chats unless opted out by Sept 28; toggle is on by default
• Applies to consumers on Free/Pro/Max (incl. Claude Code); enterprise, education, gov, and API are unchanged
• Opt-out path: Settings → Privacy → toggle off “Help improve Claude”
• Opt-in extends data retention to five years; otherwise coverage notes ~30 days
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u/trtm Aug 29 '25
Just cancelled my Claude Max subscription. What are the alternatives now?
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u/Still-Ad3045 Aug 29 '25
Don’t know man, I canceled mine like a month ago and honestly just taken a break from coding. Too many changes rn.
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u/oxygen_addiction Aug 30 '25
Glm4.5 and Glm4.5-air via Claude Code Router are probably the closest things. I use them via Openrouter.
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Aug 29 '25
Codex, I canceled three max subs and I’m not coming back. This is what ambiguity in pricing and deeply fluctuating quality gets you.
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u/cantthinkofausrnme Aug 29 '25
Every other company does this, so likely the only default is running your own localmodel
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u/Winter-Ad781 Aug 29 '25
Bye bye! Also there are none if you read the terms of service, which is so funny to me. The ToS makes far more wild claims at every service.
Anthropic was just nice enough to let you know.
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u/Suspicious_Hunt9951 Aug 29 '25
so you will go to competition that also uses claude as their model? lol
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u/CurtissYT Aug 29 '25
Tbh the only way I'd turn that on, is only if it turned off the weekly limits, other use there isn't a point
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u/sailnlax04 Aug 29 '25
Why is this a problem? i don't really give a fuck if they use my data to train Claude? Anyone else
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u/Kadoomed Aug 29 '25
It could be an issue if there's confidential or sensitive information which could be personal, IP related, financial, security etc etc. You don't want that being presented in a Claude response to a competitor or actor with ill intent.
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Aug 29 '25
[deleted]
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u/anOrphanedPlatypus Aug 29 '25 edited Aug 29 '25
If you're generating millions per month and dumping client data into an AI you should absolutely not be using the consumer version of Claude, what on earth.
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Aug 29 '25
[deleted]
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u/anOrphanedPlatypus Aug 29 '25
Yes, all the plans are subject to the same terms and data retention policies. You should be running your own in Bedrock or similar if you're putting anything client related into it. IP, sensitive data, etc. Your company will get absolutely reamed if your clients find out
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u/kitranah Aug 30 '25
ok but for me random pro user all i have to do is continue to not tell claude anything too personal. like dont tell claude my phone or credit card number. i already dont do that.
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u/redditisunproductive Aug 29 '25
It's not only training. Long-term storage itself is a security concern. With the amount of money at stake, it's practically guaranteed that a state actor will breach the servers at some point, if they haven't already. Basically, don't send any information unless you would survive it going public. It's quite disturbing how people use AI as a therapist and how that could be weaponized by bad actors. The tech sector in general tends to have sloppy security practices while in early hypergrowth.
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u/Zachhandley Aug 29 '25
You might not. I, for one, am not paying for a fucking service where I am also contributing…..
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u/moogoesthecat Aug 31 '25
Isn't this like every "service", including things like streaming services, video games or even your internet connection?
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u/Zachhandley Aug 31 '25
Maybe, I have a VPN on my internet, and for others it’s to genuinely improve the product. But for AI it literally IS the product. My knowledge or my words, if they paid me or gave me usage, that’s one thing. But to just take it after touting yourself as the company of privacy for 2 years is such a pathetic bitch move
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u/threespire Aug 29 '25
It comes down to what you are using the service for - some users are using AI for therapy type sensitive issues (not recommended for obvious reasons but that doesn’t stop people using it) and data from that isn’t the sort of thing I’d personally want shared with a training set, even with anonymisation given data is not as obfuscated as people think at times…
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u/jclicky Aug 29 '25
For those of us working on advanced AI engineering innovations on our own, as an independent contractor, we now have to pivot completely to enterprise accounts and tbh, fuck Anthropic for that, I’ll just roll their APIs thru another service that doesn’t scale back systems I depend on for my competitive advantage.
For engineers or architects who are in this field and actively being headhunted (not me, aspiring there), those people now can’t use any Anthropic personal tier account lest they overshare their agentic workflow ideations / development workflows off of any personal account that Anthropic will now be able to crib from in order to train their next successive models.
For most people, NBD, and they have delusions of grandeur if they thing they are special (self-aware enough I wonder about that for myself & what I’m building in Claude MacOS MCPs, Cursor w/ sub-agents in the CLI, etc.).
But Anthropic has intentionally catered to & targeted developers - some devs don’t care & just upload everything to public repos with MIT licenses (most do) so they won’t care.
But for some of us, I want to keep my competitive advantage in the labor market if my day job is relying on me for advanced AI engineering.
Now, Claude ain’t gonna be a thought-partner for me on that anymore, unless it’s a specific call to an API key I got from an enterprise cloud account to protect my insights from human review / tokenization to use in their model training.
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u/fatherofgoku Aug 29 '25
good to know this is on by default kinda sneaky ! Will explore this more
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u/Winter-Ad781 Aug 29 '25
Yeah a giant banner telling you it's going to be on unless you turn it off both in the web, app, and Claude code. So sneaky!
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u/one-wandering-mind Aug 29 '25
I understand why the data would be useful but I think this is a really bad practice. It makes me less likely to want to use them.
I thought openai was by default opt-in for this same thing when I first joined. Might have changed.
From my memory Gemini through the app was the worst. I don't think there was an easy way to opt out or maybe no way at all.
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u/Laicbeias Aug 29 '25
Id wish id can finetune a model by all my chats. So it knows what pisses me off.
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u/shableep Aug 29 '25
Something tells me that toggle is like the close door button on an elevator.
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u/Extreme-Permit3883 Aug 29 '25
Just ask for a refund. It' s a junk product, now wants to use users data to remedy?
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u/alkalisun Aug 29 '25
I feel like they are already training on my previous conversations. I have a few select problems I throw at any new model and it seems like the new model version have picked up the "guided answer" I eventually steer the model to get to. Not surprised they're formalizing it.
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u/GraciaEtScientia Aug 29 '25
What does that mean if you use claude as agent through github copilot?
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u/valium123 Aug 30 '25
Nice use this crap even more. These are nothing but surveillance tools, help them build the palantir database. More horrors incoming. 👍
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u/valium123 Aug 30 '25
So why do you all suddenly have a problem with this. You all have been benefitting from unpaid, stolen, work all this time.
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u/whiskeyplz Sep 01 '25
I see this as a great thing. It's the optimal way to better understand your user base
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u/rc_ym Aug 29 '25
Yeah, I went in and looked. It was on.
A company that tricks users into stealing data isn't a company to be trusted.
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u/Winter-Ad781 Aug 29 '25 edited Aug 29 '25
You had a massive popup you had to close to even see that. Lol
This is standard practice champ. Calm your tits
Edit: and yes you got a popup. You can't close it until you accept, so you did, buddy
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u/rc_ym Aug 29 '25
Oh, I get that that the Anthropic fanboys are way too invested in their success to be honest about this.
Companies acting like used car salesman shouldn't be the norm.
It's gross, scammy behavior, regardless of the pop up or no pop up.
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u/Winter-Ad781 Aug 29 '25
Never once stated it should be the norm.
The only thing I highlight repeatedly in my post history, is that this is a standard practice across every company. What you create with them, they own, if they choose to take it they can and will. No one cared until AI.
I'd love a world where this wasn't normal practice, where companies had to fight tooth and nail to get so much as our fucking nickname if we didn't want to give it.
However, I live in reality, I know how our systems work, I know this isn't a utopia this is unobtainable until the government falls and someone else takes over, and even then, it would probably be wishful thinking.
I direct the majority of my anger towards the cause, not the symptom. Unless you know how to undo decades of law making, court cases, and public disinformation overnight, we're stuck with it.
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u/rc_ym Aug 29 '25
Yep, the world is terrible so we should do nothing and not complain?
Great plan, dude.
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u/kitranah Aug 30 '25 edited Aug 30 '25
you're complaining to the wrong people though. anthropic cant leave the data on the table when everyone else is already using theirs to for development. honestly i am surprised anthropic wasnt already doing this. seems kind of late to the party.the people to complain to are in your government not anthropics board rooms.
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u/rc_ym Aug 30 '25
The users of the platform are the wrong people?
SMH.Oh, I already filed a complaint with the state, and shared with CISO/CIO friends. Anthopic is off the table for a lot of folks.
Personally, I think it's just another way to burn off Pro and Max customers. They are a money loser for Anthropic.
At the end of the day, it's just skeevy. And more and more Anthropic is just acting odd. I don't like it.
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u/valium123 Aug 30 '25
What makes you think that switch even works. They will train it no matter what.
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u/kitranah Aug 30 '25
tricked? you were told bold as brass. i opened claude.ai and a big window popped going "hey we wanna use your data to train claude. go opt out if you would rather not!." they aint tricking or hiding shit here.
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u/jclicky Aug 29 '25 edited Aug 29 '25
Yeah, 2+ year subscriber here is canceling my Max (maybe I’ll keep a nominal tier).
I’m not a free AI researcher.
I’m no Alan Turing but I am not a Luddite either, and you gotta pay for my insights, thank you very much.
If I now have to manually handle my own storage & shit I’ll just pivot to Notion (who actually lets you opt-out of training) as a back-end for storing chats.
But to make me rebuild my whole workflow locally from scratch as far as memory, chat storage, w/ DB retrieval vs. a native storage for some period of time?
Yah I’m salty about it.
The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if this is the initial bullshit announcement trial balloon, then if it blows up, they offer like a $300/month “no training, still keep your data,” subscription.
If they do that, people will sign up instantly because initially the paradigm was “can’t store it without letting us train.”
Feels like a gambit to make the “pay thru the nose,” situation more acceptable.
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u/jclicky Aug 29 '25
I think we’re seeing the results of Claude’s success among Devs.
Anthropic is likely telegraphing here that their storage costs per user are rising as they continue to have a more technical user base.
I wonder if - just as people were running CC 24/7 - there just might be a handful of assholes ruining this shit for everyone else.
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u/valium123 Aug 30 '25
"I'm not a free AI researcher"
You do realize this technology has been built on stolen data right? Artists, authors, developers weren't paid for their data. You benefited from it and now that it's happening to you, "I'm not a free AI researcher". LOL.
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u/iperson4213 Aug 29 '25
why not just opt out? it’s a simple toggle
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u/jclicky Aug 29 '25
No totally I am opting out. My complaint is that now that means I won’t be able to store/remember/refer (natively, in the tool) to anything more than 30days old. That sucks.
I dunno, that’s my read of it.
You have until Sept. 28 to opt in or out.
If you opt out, Claude / Anthropic deletes anything older than 30days.
Am I missing anything here???
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u/pepsilovr Aug 29 '25
Somebody else told me in another chat that they thought it meant internally they stored stuff that you deleted, was saved for that length of time. Because it says the current storage length is 30 days but I also have a two year plus account, pro, and I have two years of chats. So Unless that’s somebody that told me that was right, it just doesn’t make any sense.
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u/jclicky Aug 29 '25
So like what’s the deal? I’m trying to figure out what happens to my historic chats once/if I opt out.
Am I an idiot here?
In Gemini, for example, the activity is stored, I have DE-SELECTED “Improve Audio for training,” but I still know/understand that Google can & will use my Gemini history (chats, prompts / data) to train it’s models:
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u/pepsilovr Aug 29 '25
I don’t know for certain either. But this other person told me that they thought that it meant that anthropic is saving chats internally after you delete them for 30 days. But now that they are using your data for training, if they are, they are saving your chats internally for five years. But if you opt out, they continue to save them for only 30 days. This person made it sound like it did not affect your page full of old chats that go back for way more than 30 days. I really don’t know for sure myself either and they sure could have written it more intelligibly
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u/jclicky Aug 29 '25
Ok well this is HUGELY validating. I’m like, nose-deep in complex AI Architecture systems at work everyday and here I feel like a complete idiot: I can’t understand what the hell is going on here.
But if it does, at the end of the day, mean my entire history of chats + artifacts now revert to only 30days retained, à la Gemini (this is what Google does, want to keep your history? Yah we get to use it then, which is WHY I suspect that’s what Anthropic is doing here) privacy, then I’m out.
I mean, at this point like a huge amount of model-effectiveness at this point is just a shit ton of AI systems-scaffolding + sys prompts at all kinds of levels, webhooks, tool calls, custom MCP instructions, etc.; prob best to just build that shit myself then do API calls to enterprise keys only when I have to on a more disciplined token level (which is what the Labs want us to do too), keeping what I can private vs. sharing it all.
End of an era. It’s the end of giving us this stuff at discount/free to build hype.
Oh well, thought Anthropic was built diff, guess they just are racing to the bottom for market behaviors / standards like the rest of them.
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u/kitranah Aug 30 '25
i dont think thats how that works. for example chats on clauda.ai or the desktop would hand around until you delete them. after which the count down starts on on when anthropic deletes them from their servers.
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u/rakotomandimby Aug 29 '25
Why would one reject training the tool for training? Cut the branch you are sitting on?
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u/jclicky Aug 29 '25
Because if they want my talents as an AI architect (for what I build in AI systems for my own workflows), make me a fucking offer to have me jump ship from my day-job, you can’t crib from my innovations for your model training.
I’m not Leonardo da Vinci here, but it’s the principle of the thing if I’m using a Claude model to analyze AI engineering code / ideas / architecture. Now that’s gonna be on a VertexAI Anthropic API key for me, from now on, with a new enterprise account just for my own lonesome contractor self if I have clients I’m doing AI systems work for.
Notion lets me store all kinds of shit on their DB without training their AI on it, Anthropic used to let me store all our historic chats + artifacts + the context I engineered & brought to chats + my project structures/logic too.
But now? Can’t use Anthropic’s native tools at all without an Enterprise account, and fuck that shit. Might as well do enterprise with a cloud provider that gets me value for that, like Azure or Google.
For example, It is like night & fucking day between what I send to Gemini under my work enterprise umbrella of protections vs. my personal Gmail on Ultra (after this mess, will pivot to my personal domain on an enterprise Google account with Ultra + an Anthropic API run thru VertexAI to protect my IP & just have pro on my personal Gmail).
I still NEVER share sensitive work or personal IP / PII with AI (like creds, secrets, etc.), ever, but I AM actively working with AI tos to develop innovative AI / Agentic systems iterations, code, prompts, etc.
When / if I am knocking on a particular new AI engineering door for a big improvement, framework, or protocol I haven’t yet seen out in the wild, already deployed, that’s different, I want that (private, confidential, proprietary) idea / context protected from use by the labs/providers to train their models and / or send up for human-review after.
These tech companies have to buy my ideas if they want that, especially if I’m paying for the service, unless I’m intentionally contributing to open-source projects for visibility.
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u/rakotomandimby Aug 30 '25
I read your point, and I understand. But you are happy when Claude responses are relevant and accurate: this not magic, this has to do with training. Plus, you can be honored your knowledge is taken as training reference, if it ever is. Paying is not always an excuse, as it can be to afford hardware, energy, and so on, not only for data.
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u/KKuettes Aug 29 '25
They are just following competition