Comment by adastra22
1 day ago
Yes, in general. I think in your specific example it is more likely to ingest the screenshots (upload to Anthropic) and use its built-in vision model to extract the relevant information. But if you had like a million screenshots, it might choose to run some Python OCR software locally instead.
In either case though, all the tool calls and output are part of the session and therefore Input. Even if it called a local OCR application to extract the info, it would probably then ingest that info to act on it (e.g. rename files). So the content is still being uploaded to Anthropic.
Note that you can opt-out of training in your profile settings. Now whether they continue to respect that into the future...
When local compute is more efficient data may remain local (e.g. when asking it to "find duplicate images" in millions of images it will likely (hopefully) just compute hashes and compare those), but complete folder contents are just as likely to be ingested (uploaded) and considered "Inputs", for which even the current Privacy Policy already explicitly says these will be "collected" (even when opting-out of allowing subsequent use for training).
To be clear: I like what Anthropic is doing, they appear more trustworthy/serious than OpenAI, but Cowork will result in millions of unsuspecting users having complete folders full of data uploaded and persisted on servers, currently, owned by Anthropic.