[catoc]

According to Anthropic’s privacy policy you collect my “Inputs” and “If you include personal data … in your Inputs, we will collect that information”

Do all files accessed in mounted folders now fall under collectable “Inputs” ?

Ref: https://www.anthropic.com/legal/privacy

[adastra22]

Yes.

[catoc]

Thanks - would you have a source for this confirmation?

[adastra22]

It’s how the LLM works. Anything accessed by the agent in the folder becomes input to the model. That’s what it means for the agent to access something. Those inputs are already “Input” in the ToS sense.

[catoc]

That an LLM needs input tokens to produce output was understood. That is not what the privacy policy is about. To me the policy reads Anthropic also subsequently persists (“collects”) your data. That is the point I was hoping to get clarified.

[adastra22]

The only thing Anthropic receives is the chat session. Files only ever get sent when they are included in the session - they are never sent to Anthropic otherwise.

Note that I am talking about this product where the Claude session is running locally (remote LLM of course, but local Claude Code). They also have a "Claude Code on the Web" thing where the Claude instance is running on their server. In principle, they could be collecting and training on that data even if it never enters a session. But this product is running on your computer, and Anthropic only sees files pulled in by tool calls.

[catoc]

So when using Cowork on a local folder and asking it to "create a new spreadsheet with a list of expenses from a pile of screenshots", those screenshots may[*] become part of the "collected Inputs" kept by Anthropic.

[*]"may" because depending on the execution, instead of directly uploading the screenshots, a (python) script may be created that does local processing and only upload derived output