Before you tell an AI your secrets
People say remarkable things to chatbots. Cap tables, acquisition talks, the co-founder situation, the health scare. The interface feels like a private notebook, so people treat it like one. It is not a notebook. It's a client talking to a company's servers, and what happens next depends entirely on that company's choices.
Before you tell any AI something that could hurt you, five questions are worth an honest answer. We're publishing them because founders should ask them of us too.
One. Does it train on what I say? For many consumer AI products the default answer has been yes, unless you find the setting. Training means your words become, in some diffuse way, part of the product. The setting also tends to move around.
Two. Do humans ever read it? Review queues and "quality sampling" are standard practice across the industry, usually disclosed in a clause nobody reads. Somebody's job is reading transcripts. Ask whether yours can be one of them.
Three. How long does it exist? Most services keep conversations indefinitely by default. Anything that exists can leak, be breached, or — this one surprises people — be subpoenaed. No AI conversation has legal privilege. Not ours either. The only privileged conversation is one that no longer exists, which is why retention windows matter more than encryption claims.
Four. Whose servers is it on? If the product is a wrapper around a big lab's API, your words travel to that lab under that lab's terms, whatever the wrapper's privacy page says. The wrapper often can't make promises it can enforce.
Five. What happens if the company dies? Data is an asset in an acquisition unless someone wrote down that it isn't. The graveyard of shut-down apps is also a graveyard of migrated databases.
Our answers, for the record: we never train on your words and never have humans read them; each turn is processed in the moment by services we name publicly — the model at Cerebras, speech-to-text at Mistral, the voice at Fish Audio — and stored by none of them; your conversations live encrypted on your phone, so there is no Northwind database to breach, sell or subpoena; and a written covenant that your words are never an asset in any deal. The long versions live in the privacy policy, the plain version in the covenant.
Whatever tool you use — including ours — ask the five questions. The good ones will enjoy answering.