Data privacy has emerged as a key consideration for companies when choosing an AI vendor, amid fears that frontier AI companies, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, may be quietly using their customers’ intellectual property to improve their models.
Some executives worry that using AI models from these companies will eventually result in their “secret sauce” leaking to competitors—or worse, that OpenAI and Anthropic will build products that directly compete with them.
The biggest controversy came in June, when Anthropic began mandating a 30-day retention policy for all chats with its most powerful AI models, Fable and Mythos. Many companies had an “almost allergic reaction” to this, says a source who advises clients on becoming AI-native, speaking under the condition of anonymity because his company works closely with Anthropic. “The industry at large totally rejected it, and was pretty angry about it.”
