OpenAI’s Massive Data Grab

I spent some time this week going through the whole suite of OpenAI agreements and policies and was quite surprised at what I found in their Terms of Use (TOU). It turns out that OpenAI’s confidentiality provision is unilateral: it includes confidentiality protection solely for OpenAI’s information. That means that neither the inputs provided to OpenAI nor the output it produces are treated as confidential by OpenAI. This is somewhat unusual in the context of SaaS vendors, who usually at least acknowledge that the data provided to them is confidential, even if they try to limit their liability with respect to keeping such data confidential over the course of the contract. Many companies are likely to be caught off guard by this provision.