This is the question I am asked most, usually by someone who has been quietly pasting work into ChatGPT for a year and has just started to wonder. The answer depends almost entirely on which plan you are on.

Business plans: no, by default

OpenAI says that by default it does not use data from ChatGPT Business, ChatGPT Enterprise, ChatGPT Edu or its API to train or improve its models, and that your organisation owns its inputs and outputs. A business can opt in to sharing data, but it has to choose to.

Anthropic’s position is the same for its commercial products. When it changed its consumer terms in 2025, it stated that the change does not apply to Claude for Work (Team and Enterprise), Claude for Government, Claude for Education, or API use, including through Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud.

Free and personal plans: it depends on a setting

On ChatGPT’s free and personal plans, conversations can be used to improve the models unless the person turns off the “Improve the model for everyone” setting under Data Controls. Temporary Chats are not used for training.

On Claude’s Free, Pro and Max plans, each person is asked to choose whether their chats and coding sessions can be used for training, and can change that choice in their privacy settings. Anthropic says that if you allow it, the data is kept for up to five years; if you do not, it keeps its existing 30-day retention.

Why the setting is not enough for a business

A training toggle on a personal account protects one person, if they remember. It does nothing for the rest of the team, you cannot check it, and the account leaves with the employee. That is why I treat “which plan” as a company decision rather than a personal one:

  • Everyone who touches client or business information uses a company account on a business plan.
  • Personal AI accounts are fine for personal things, and stay out of client work.
  • The policy says so in one sentence, so nobody has to guess.

Training is not the only question

Not training on your data is the headline, but it is not the whole of privacy. You still want to know who in your team can see what, where files are stored, and what happens to a draft before it reaches a client. Business plans add the admin controls that make those answerable: managed accounts, a central place to switch things on and off, and in the larger tiers retention settings and audit logs.

What to do this week

Find out which accounts your team is actually using. In most businesses I audit, the answer is a mix of free accounts, a couple of personal paid ones, and nobody quite sure. Pick one business plan, move people onto it, and write down the rule. It is the cheapest privacy improvement available to you.