https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/23/openai-tumber-...
... then gave them back, and then tbe shooting happened.
Is that really true? Zero Data Retention (ZDR) is standard language in enterprise contracts and it seems quite egregious a vendor would want to take on that amount of liability and ignore the contract terms.
On top of that, Anthropic is SOC2 and ISO27001 so they've had _some_ independent auditing (although they could still try to hide such logging/recording anyway)
With that in mind, they also have a hell of an incentive to _not_ secretly collect that data.
Of course ZDR oftentimes comes with contract minimums so individuals and small corps are locked out and subject to the whims of the provider.
No, this would be a civil lawsuit not criminal. The plaintiff (the harmed party) could sue Anthropic for whatever they wanted. Put another way, they're at the mercy of big corp army of lawyers, not a paid off politician.
AWS makes ZDR promises
I'm 100% certain they keep that for retraining. I've seen advertising pipelines promise the same thing and drown in data "because it's anonimized".
I'm certain same exact thing happens with Ai chatbots, even on top enterprise licenses.
If this is something you care about (compliance) your vendor due diligence process should include ensuring the company used a respected/trusted auditor.
it IS an accounting certification. That include a cursory look at (likely outdated, often creator for the audit and never read by anyone) documentation.
Edit: linkify
Essentially, this is why AWS is reporting this to begin with.
Do you care about cattle's opinions? I guess a few of us do, but most of us don't.
The wealthy CEOs and boardmembers found a way to make even more money, but know that it will make the people who are aware of it angry. So they, as a class, find other issues that they can enflame (or manufacture wholesale), through the manipulation of social media algorithms and legacy media, both of which they own and control. They would much rather have "ordinary people" angry about trans athletes or immigrants, than about the surveillance state they profit from, or stealing our data they profit from, etc...
Unfortunately, we humans are very easy to manipulate by making us angry. If "ordinary people don't make enough noises for any problems they see in life", its hardly our fault if we're too busy surviving in the current economy, and the elites are spending billions to make us angry about anything except the elites.
They say their models are too dangerous for the public, so they can nerf the GA versions while allowing only their preferred megacorp or nation state partners access to the real secret good versions.
We can hope the Chinese open weight models will catch up, but if/when they really reach parity with proprietary frontier models you can bet they'll stop releasing their weights too. They don't do this stuff out of the kindness of their hearts.
It's tough to imagine what might possibly derail this.
Public utilities?
Meta and Anthropic both trained on pirated books and there were not required to destroy their models. I simply don't get it. It just encourages to do things first and see later what happens. Regulations are just a small business cost.
I don't know how realistic that expectation is, but if you think about the difference between say 10,000 USD speakers and 50,000 speakers then the 50k ones may sound slightly better but certainly not enough to justify the 40k difference
- Smartphone cameras > dedicated cameras
- "UHD" streaming video > UHD Blueray @3-7x the bitrate
- 128kbps music streams > CDs
- Airpods > equally priced but much better sounding headphones
Sure the nicer stuff still exists and is indeed more performant, but it's not cheap and it's also not what's driving the market. I don't see why this won't apply to AI once local models become "good enough" too.
No, but they do have incentive to continue to release with open weights because doing so directly affects the US based labs that are doing this for profit and power.
What's likely to happen is import controls on software as a form of US protectionism. It will be the encryption battle all over again, but this time about your right to both run AI models locally on your own hardware (that the labs and big tech would love if you could continue to not able to afford or acquire so they can rent it to you), and a ban on the distribution and use of foreign models.
I wouldn't be surprised of Anthropic and OpenAI also successfully lobby for a limit on how big open source models can be in the US as well in the name of "safety."
Make no mistake, they all fully intend to pull the ladder up behind them, and they intend to do it soon.
IMHO this is about protecting their model. If you can get a N-1 model for 1% of the N cost their business breaks down.
The other interesting one is how some of the Chinese open weights models have changed licenses that prevent some commercial exploitation of them. That's not closing their doors, but it's some steps towards ensuring their business model is protected.
I've said it before and I say it again: nomatter where you stand on generative AI's usefulness, you are crazy for putting your last private space – your thoughts – in the hands of someone other than you. Going further down this line will not end well.