Agreed. Azure, GCP, and AWS have gated models that only exist in their infrastructures and can't dial out unless yous give them permissions to do so.

Don't use a models only company if you need enterprise level security and data protection.

fair enough, but I still think it's an ethical issue for the model providers to silently reenable training after people have explicitly opted out

It didn't happen to me, nobody I know seems to have experienced this. How can you prove to us that you ever toggled it off in the first place? This is a pretty serious accusation to make so blindly

Not an accusation! Just seems like it's happening, which is why I wanted to post this to ask if others noticed the same thing. I definitely can't prove it. If it had just been me I would have assumed I forgot to turn it off. But the fact that my coworkers noticed the same thing made it suspicious. Also the linked HN thread suggested others have seen this happening too

Fwiw I've had this happen with Mistral, I fell right in the middle of them changing from opt-out to opt-in AND removing of their org-wide dial. They reversed that last decision (the org-wide dial returned) about 48 hours later, but in the process they turned all sliders for all my staff back to "on". Not sure if it was all malicious (I think not, just a very crappy move that hit our trust in them pretty bad). After some emails they ensured me they stored no data for training. But strange things happen.

Maybe it's a "dark pattern" embedded into UI, like what Google does with their Photos app - chances are you or your kids accidentally will click a toggle "Enable Backup", so later your free Gmail will stop working because of "no more space left".

Friend, there’s no need to be so combative. OP didn’t make an accusation, they observed something and made a conclusion which may be wrong or right, then came on HN to say the thing seems (key word that they used) to be happening and asking if anyone else has experienced it to test the theory and act accordingly.

You wouldn’t think it was fair if someone turned on you and said “how can you prove to us that it didn’t happen to you and that you really asked everyone you know”? That would be silly, right?

Why so aggressive? Other people have shared the same thing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49643556

Yeah but how expensive is that vs $20 or 100/month subs?

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On the other hand (in particular for smaller companies particularly not in the USA): How much can you afford to pay? Can you actually afford the self-hosted route?

If the IP in question is software code then a lot of companies are overvaluing that at this point.

[delayed]

Yeah, why didn't I think of just spending $30k/month on an inference server and figuring out how to train a 2T parameter model. I clearly don't care about this at all or I would just do that.

[delayed]

"Just"

Deep seek have released their inference engine.

https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepInfer

Software is cheap these days, hardware is not

surely because of the speedup of AI, you don't need to figure it out, now claude can train the model for you!!!11

Why do you need to train a model at all?

You surely don't need frontier models for any job that isn't going to replace a human. If the human is still in the loop, just use a model the human can work with. It can be quite small. You could even be running Qwen 3.8 27B for each developer and it would be fine, and you are in control of your own destiny and can make more progressive judgements about things.

I don't really understand how the AI world has caused so much black-and-white thinking to come about. You are not under mortal threat if you don't use the latest models. This is just FUD. You still have people with brains and you might get a better result over the longer term if you use AI to assist them in their choices rather than make them sit there and hit return.

There are cases like this for Chinese models: https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/26/cohere-says-alibabas-qwen-...

Oh, for sure.

But you can't trust any LLM, or any output from any LLM. You need to protect against stuff like this regardless. They could all do it, and quite accidentally. Even an LLM you trained yourself could do this to you, based on the training data and based on RAG.

But if you want to avoid the specific case we are talking about where your inference provider sees everything you do, and ignores your preferences, then running someone's LLM on your own inference is the only way forward.

Its astonishing that anyone thinks that these companies even respect the checkbox. These are some of the objectively scummiest companies on earth that have violated nearly ever copyright law we have