[consumer451]

The other major thing is almost as bad, and actually maybe even worse for trust of AI features in b2b apps:

> Anthropic requires 30 day data retention for Fable and Mythos

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48464258

I used to be able to tell my enterprise customers something simple, that I really believe: "We use Anthropic models via Bedrock/Azure, therefore we are guaranteed that your data will not be used for training models."

That simple blanket statement is no longer true. Also, most normal people/customers only read headlines, and this is a huge story. From my point of view, as someone deploying LLMs in my apps, trust comms with my clients just got set back two years.

[Spooky23]

I’m very cautious with using these tools with certain clients, as I’m often contractually obligated to do things that my downstream supplier can rug pull at any time.

You should never use any of the frontier models with operational workloads manipulating or interpreting customer data.

[consumer451]

I appreciate the reply. Could you please help me understand what you mean by "You should never use any of the frontier models?"

Does that mean the latest model, hosted by the lab, Bedrock, or Azure Foundry? Or, do you mean only use self-hosted models, or what did you mean by that? I would really love to learn what others are doing. I felt like my trust story was solid enough, prior to all this. I have been deploying and integrating Claude and Sonnet (latest 4.x-2), on Azure, as my client base has MS contract trust, for better or worse, and Anthropic models have been making my products amazing.

To see my other thoughts on this cluster f, please see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48488781

[Spooky23]

Sure. It's really about informed consent and acceptance of risk. I'm very conservative about that due to my background and business.

Say you have some flow that is processing/handling regulated, sensitive or other customer data with the LLM as part of an operational process. An example that I'm thinking of is for a customer who wants to more efficiently resolve or route IT incidents to the right place. The incident data may contain user-provided data has strings attached from a compliance perspective.

If you're using a third party API, your T&Cs are the only protection that you have. Microsoft/Google/Amazon are pretty decent by default. When I worked for the government, we had the leverage to extract much favorable terms from the big vendors like Google, Amazon, Microsoft as well. With Anthropic, and OpenAI, they are in the move fast and break things universe, you need to be bringing alot of money to the table to get terms changes, and you can easily stumble into a situation where they are retaining data in a manner that your customer will not like. So unless the customer is informed and accepting of that risk, proceed with caution.

I've had some success using self-hosted inference for these scenarios.

For development of software, totally different story -- it's your IP and you make the risk call.

[consumer451]

Oh man, thanks for taking the time to reply. I feel a bit better now, lol.

If you read my rant linked previously, yeah... we are on the same page. As another user pointed out in that thread, the issue here is that even on Bedrock and Azure Foundry, now with Fable 5, Anthropic inserts themselves as an additional data subprocessor that we would have to consider and certainly disclose, correct?

That kind of destroys the whole point of using Bedrock/Azure for the model, doesn't it?

[Spooky23]

Yeah tbh I may have read past some of your previous post :) What you’re saying is what makes me nervous.

It was definitely sold as “anthropic IP, thorough your old pals at the hyper scaler”. And it’s turning into something else — I’m having lunch with AWS and this other guy showed up with them.

[consumer451]

No worries :) What this showed me is the power/velocity/inertia that Anthropic can hold over the 3rd party providers. Like, they should have pushed back on this, as it must have been clear to the 3rd parties that this change was a big deal to their customers... and yet, it went how Anthropic wanted it to go.

[Hizonner]

> I used to be able to tell my enterprise customers something simple, that I really believe: "We use Anthropic models via Bedrock/Azure, therefore we are guaranteed that your data will not be used for training models."

They claim they're not using it for training, only for "safety", and in fact I believe them. If you think they're lying, then why didn't you think they were lying about zero retention before? And "don't throw this in the training bin" is a relatively easy policy for them to get right. Especially because, no matter what your "enterprise leaders" tell themselves, your queries probably have close to zero real training value.

What I don't believe is that they can guarantee it won't leak to non-training parts of Anthropic, leak to or be stolen by outside actors, or be coerced out of them. That risk comes from creating the record in the first place, and that is the problem.

[consumer451]

I explained/ranted about why this new scenario is far more worrisome in this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48488781

[Hizonner]

I still don't think "enterprise" customers' data have enough training value for an "over-eager PM" to bother with them. An over-eager PM obsessed with AGI, no less. I'm pretty sure more training on corporate slop is not the path to AGI (even less so if you want "aligned" AGI...).

Also, while I do agree that Anthropic's internal controls are unlikely to be on the level of AWS's or Azure's. I'm pretty confident they're good enough that random PMs aren't going to get access to things like that, especially for use in formal projects. Especially since "safety" is Anthropic's other obsession, which means "safety" data are going to be watched.

But anyway, we seem to be agreed that retaining stuff that used to get flushed early is a risk, and every copy is a risk, and sending it to more companies is a risk, regardless of the fine points of how things might go wrong.

[consumer451]

I think we mostly agree. The one point of contention is likely just due to a lack of clarity on my part.

By over-eager PM, I didn't mean someone being malicious, just moving too fast to think about how some logging they set up might have negative effects for my clients way down the line.

Then months later, some other person finding a store of novel data, and being like... that looks nice... not gonna ask any questions/look a gift horse in the mouth... woohoo AGI!

On the far darker side, while I am a fan of the team at Anthropic: good intentions and all, they had to pay a $1.5B settlement for knowingly ingesting copyrighted books. That was just the cost of doing business. They did that, and now they are a trillion dollar company.

https://www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/