Anthropic Will Now Train Claude on Chat Transcripts

In a sharp shift for its privacy policy, Anthropic revealed today that it will begin training its Claude AI models on user data by default. So you will need to opt-out if you’re not interested in this happening.

“Today, we’re rolling out updates to our Consumer Terms and Privacy Policy that will help us deliver even more capable, useful AI models,” the Anthropic announcement explains. “We’re now giving users the choice to allow their data to be used to improve Claude and strengthen our safeguards against harmful usage like scams and abuse. Adjusting your preferences is easy and can be done at any time.”

This change applies to customers on Anthropic’s Claude Free, Pro, and Max plans. But it doesn’t impact Claude for Work, Claude Gov, Claude for Education, or Claude API use, including via third parties such as Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI.

“By participating, you’ll help us improve model safety, making our systems for detecting harmful content more accurate and less likely to flag harmless conversations,” Anthropic continues. “You’ll also help future Claude models improve at skills like coding, analysis, and reasoning, ultimately leading to better models for all users.”

If you do allow Claude to collect your personal data, Anthropic will retain it for five years, a major change from the current 30-day data retention policy. But if you delete any conversations they will no longer be used for model training. Anthropic says it uses “a combination of tools and automated processes to filter or obfuscate sensitive data,” and it doesn’t sell users data to third parties.

You will be able to opt-out of this invasion of privacy, by signing in to Claude and navigating to Settings > Privacy … eventually. In the meantime, you’ll see a pop-up explaining the change that will give you the opportunity to opt-out. The change will then go into effect immediately, and if you sign-in after September 28, 2025, you will need to make a data collection choice before continuing.