OpenAI seeks to one-up Anthropic with new customer privacy protections

As AI models have become more powerful, the potential for those models to be misused has grown — as has a clamor for safety guardrails that can stop such abuse from happening. AI companies must now walk a delicate tight rope between respecting their enterprise customers’ privacy while also watching usage for possible issues.

Sensing an opportunity to one-up its rival Anthropic, OpenAI just announced a privacy-centric safety approach to monitoring for misuse. The company is previewing a new service to select customers that it calls Private Safety Processing. This is an automated system that watches for potential abuse while simultaneously retaining none of the customer’s data.

This system clearly runs counter to Anthropic’s recently announced data retention policy. The policy, which has aggravated some customers, enables the AI lab to keep user data (all of their sessions — and the conversations therein) for a period of 30 days, when it comes to “covered models.” Those models include all Mythos-class models and “future models with similar capabilities,” the company says.

This policy, which was announced in July, was designed for the purposes of safety allowing the lab to sift and analyze potential impropriety. However, it has deeply concerned some enterprises that handle large amounts of sensitive data and don’t want it harbored (or inspected) by the AI lab.