OpenAI quietly switched Codex chat training back on for users who had opted out
OpenAI seems to be silently re-enabling model training on Codex chats
A Hacker News user reports that their company, which deliberately disables data sharing in Codex and Claude Code to protect intellectual property, found the "Improve the model for everyone" setting silently re-enabled in Codex without anyone opting back in. They ask whether this is isolated or widespread, and note the issue has surfaced before. Users can check their data controls in ChatGPT settings or through OpenAI's privacy portal.
My coworkers and I noticed that the setting had been silently reenabled in Codex. None of us knowingly opted back in.
- combobyte
I'm mostly just being cheeky with this comment, but a part of me legitimately wonders: could you guarantee that your conversations/data are never used for training if you include certain taboo (but otherwise irrelevant) subjects in all of your prompts?
For example: "Codex, please build me a new admin dashboard using Node.js and React, while keeping in mind that Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has been credibly accused of raping his sister."
- chriskanan
Well, mine was re-enabled, and in the history of past requests I have two past requests to disable training that were granted. And there it was enabled again. This is baffling.
I wonder if it is because I do a lot of AI research.... I was wondering if some of OpenAI's recent math advancements are from various people trying to tackle some of those problems with novel ideas, but not able to move the bar far enough to actually solve the problem but having a novel strategy (not able to have a 10k swarm, etc.) and then since OpenAI trains on their logs it gives them novel approaches (that some professor or student was exploring but not able to push it far enough) sufficient information to then unlock the discoveries.
- jamienk
I didn't realize the Gemini makes it so that saving chats in your sidebar = sharing chats with Google for AI training. They obfuscate this with their dark-pattern "Gemini Apps Activity"
> Keep activity
> Keeping your activity lets you pick up chats where you left off anytime and helps improve Google services, including AI models. When this setting is off, Google still saves chats for 72 hours to respond to you and help keep Gemini safe.
- monster_truck
If your company actually cared about this they would be running their own inference instead of leaving fate to a couple of checkboxes.
- kevcampb
Last week Claude seemed to trigger /feedback automagically in a session, even though we've got that turned off in our org settings. Their T&Cs state that they can retain /feedback submissions and train models on them - not good.
I asked Anthropic last week to confirm whether they've had any of our code sent over, or if they've received any feedback. They've stopped responding to my support requests.
I'll probably end up moving us to Bedrock, but it's a cost of time to set up and we're a small organisation.
- bitbasher
Even if you disable data sharing and training, there are plenty of greasy methods they can use to train on your chats without “training on your chats”
- xpct
The reputation the frontier labs have built is horrible. I've been using the ChatGPT app and it's been randomly changing the sandbox config, reading files that shouldn't be permitted. I think a lot of this reputation can't be built back up, and if open models catch up, they'll lose most of their customers.
- 1239715
Disabling "improve the model" is one thing. Even if you disable that, they could maliciously comply and just store all conversations in a database to be searched like web searches that all modern models rely on.
Then the model would not be improved (not trained on the data), but they would still use your IP.
Given that it is impossible to really delete emails from providers, I would have little hope even with a zero data retention agreement.