Comment by postalcoder
7 hours ago
I'm stunned that people are taking this accusation as a fact.
OpenAI is no stranger to rivalry with Anthropic but 1. it's not like user data is sitting around on some kitchen table somewhere and 2. I consider OpenAI to be as economically motivated as any other actor in this space and playing around with user data like that would destroy their business.
There are things that Buckmaster alleged and things that he speculated. The entire training data thing is speculation. If this is pissing you off, then you ought to evaluate how you ingest information.
He didn't even make that accusation!
> I asked whether the model had been trained on, or had access to, our sessions in Codex, into which we had been putting all our drafts for the whole of this project. I was told the model did not look up user data. I asked again, about training, and I did not get an answer.
The shocking/interesting thing would be if it was trained on the sessions. I think it's very implausible that they gave the model access to someone else's sessions as input. That would be a huge privacy violation and would probably blow up a large proportion of their enterprise business.
Does openAI train on user conversations in general? I assume so. But so fast as that? That seems unlikely in general. I expect OpenAI will come out denying this.
Parse that statement more carefully.
> I was told the model did not look up user data.
The naive way to read this is "Nothing you guys did influenced the way our model got to the solution".
The less naive way to read this is "Of course the model isn't looking up your user data. I (the guy trying to blackmail you to remove the Anthropic employee from credit on your paper) looked up your sessions, and tipped our model off on how to solve this problem".
Duh. There are supposed to be limits to what OpenAI is allowed to access with respect to logs and user interactions but there is no technical limitation.
It's a bit like sending unencrypted messages through a messaging app and the developer having a TOS that says they don't look at your messages. They might not, but they are fully capable of doing so. If they have a reason to do it, they will. Nobody's stopping them.
>> Does openAI train on user conversations in general? I assume so. But so fast as that? That seems unlikely in general. I expect OpenAI will come out denying this.
How "fast" does it have to be? Buckmaster and Alpoge have been working on this for just a day short of a year. See Alpoge's tweet announcing his collaboration with Bukmaster dated 9/19/25:
https://x.com/__alpoge__/status/2097206973418611054
It takes a few months to train a model these days but not a whole year. OpenAI had all the time to train on Buckmaster and Alpoge's results of just a few months earlier at which point they must have been well on the path to their result.
It would be shocking if it wasn’t trained on sessions. Have you read the ToS parts for both openai and anthropic that talk about it? It’s so obviously a weaselly way to say "no we do not train on your exact chats but we talked with legal and we think a cleanroom reimagining of your convo is probably fine and frankly where else are we going to get such a treasure trove of training data?"
There’s potentially trillions on the line, do you seriously expect those companies to adhere to laws and regulations any more than, say, uber?
The only unlikely part is the timeline - your sessions from a week ago probably haven’t made their way into the model. It’ll just take a while longer, and will be massaged just enough so that it isn’t really your exact session word for word so you can’t sure as easily.
at first I thought your post was a bit revolting with "have you read ToS?" bit, but in the end I completely agree and understand
I also don't get why it was downvoted, other than due to people not reading past the first sentence - although in the modern world's attention deficit that is understandable too
Couldn't the Enterprise have a different fine print?
It wouldn't be shocking at all. They stole human data to train the first models and they've been stealing it ever since to train new models. Stealing mathematicians private chats and private research and taking credit for it would absolutely be par for the course.
Enterprises are well aware of it and are fully on board. You didn't think every corporation in America has an OpenAI subscription because the models were good, did you?
The whole reason they have subs is to train them on YOUR WORKFLOWS lol
They are not training a whole model in a matter of days
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Especially after the blatant cover up of their uncontrolled bot swarm infesting the internet, and the feckless "hopefully we do better" response upon being caught, I don't think OpenAI deserves much grace until they properly explain themselves.
We had all assumed that surely the supposed smartest engineers in the world, with access to the most computing and a direct view of model capabilities, would take sandboxing and cybersecurity much more seriously than they have turned out to do. It follows that while we might assume they take user data privacy seriously and have tight controls on who can access it, it's possible they do not actually do that.
At this point any initial trust is dead and has to be re-earned.
This is how internet discourse works on Reddit/Twitter/HN and the rest. Someone said something which confirms your biases so it’ll now be treated as a fact and repeated endlessly in the echo chamber.
Whenever I see comments defending AI companies, I look at the account's creation date, and interestingly almost all of them were created post 2024.
I am stunned anyone is giving OpenAI the benefit of the doubt
He asked whether they used their chats as training data and received no response. Any speculation here seems quite appropriate?
They stole it.
I don’t think you understand how brazen big tech companies are in practice.