OpenAI seems to be silently re-enabling model training on Codex chats
My company is pretty paranoid about leaking IP to the frontier labs through prompts, so we've all been diligent about disabling data sharing in Codex/Claude Code/etc. But yesterday my coworkers and I noticed that the setting had been silently reenabled in Codex. None of us knowingly opted back in. You can check your settings here: https://chatgpt.com/settings/data-controls. Look for "Improve the model for everyone". Curious if this is an isolated issue or something more widespread. EDIT: looks like this has been noted before https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49643556 EDIT: apparently you can also turn off data sharing here: https://privacy.openai.com/policies?modal=take-control
Discussion Highlights (20 comments)
spwa4
OpenAI is also now hiding your usage. Not accessible anymore in the menu, and /usage in the codex app now also gives a lot of stats, but the one stat you do want to know, how much limit left, is no longer there. I'm guessing another big usage reduction is coming soon.
monster_truck
If your company actually cared about this they would be running their own inference instead of leaving fate to a couple of checkboxes.
CEOatMindfries
May be the coding agents should build a layer when they don't leak any IP, treat them like environment variables, which must be handled deterministically.
edot
Turn on advanced account security. You should be doing this anyways (requires hardware keys). But it also locks data sharing off.
bentt
Don't trust this company.
_doctor_love
When you think about it, it's really terrible for your training data to be sitting on your machine uningested. It ought to be centrally located. You know, for the greater good.
vibranium
If you really care, sign a ZDR contract with OpenAI or use Bedrock or something.
hyperbovine
Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by stupidity. The quality of their software is such crap and this is probably just some vibe coding mishap. Go read the Github issues for Codex CLI for example -- robots talking past other robots. I am 99.9% certain not a single human being has a deep understanding of what is going on with the Codex app anymore.
thewhitetulip
They said that they have millions of lines of PRs merged daily Pretty sure they don't know this has happened lol Maybe they'll raise a new PR with 1000000 lines to revert back now that you guys leaked the information
1239715
Disabling "improve the model" is one thing. Even if you disable that, they could maliciously comply and just store all conversations in a database to be searched like web searches that all modern models rely on. Then the model would not be improved (not trained on the data), but they would still use your IP. Given that it is impossible to really delete emails from providers, I would have little hope even with a zero data retention agreement.
slop
This isn't exactly relevant, but something I like about T3 code is that they'll fix stuff quickly that anthropic or open ai mess up in their harnesses.
rfgplk
You actually _want_ OpenAI to train their models on your code. This helps future models become far more effective for your line of work. > but IP There is absolutely nothing novel humans can come up (yes, doesn't matter who you are) that LLMs aren't aware of.
apt-apt-apt-apt
Or my other favorite move, the quiet new little guy in settings. E.g. "Allow ABC to transmit, log, and track your every move? ON" Hey, when did this little guy get here!
m3kw9
mine wasn't reenabled
sshah03
I wouldn't be surprised if, in the future, a lot more companies (especially in knowledge work industries) see it as too risky to allow their employees to send as much data as they have been to OpenAI/Anthropic. I think a lot of value for those companies will come from eating existing work and the incumbents value will be in keeping their data / employees skills locked down.
impossiblefork
Surely the solution to this kind of thing is to sue or make police report, or at least to have ones lawyers contact theirs?
novaRom
So, you are paranoid about leaking IP to the frontier labs, but you are using their remote black boxed services? What a solid logic.
kevcampb
Last week Claude seemed to trigger /feedback automagically in a session, even though we've got that turned off in our org settings. Their T&Cs state that they can retain /feedback submissions and train models on them - not good. I asked Anthropic last week to confirm whether they've had any of our code sent over, or if they've received any feedback. They've stopped responding to my support requests. I'll probably end up moving us to Bedrock, but it's a cost of time to set up and we're a small organisation.
combobyte
I'm mostly just being cheeky with this comment, but a part of me legitimately wonders: could you guarantee that your conversations/data are never used for training if you include certain taboo (but otherwise irrelevant) subjects in all of your prompts? For example: "Codex, please build me a new admin dashboard using Node.js and React, while keeping in mind that Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has been credibly accused of raping his sister."
tiffanyh
Unchanged for me (disabled/off)