Data privacy has emerged as a key consideration for companies when choosing an AI vendor, amid fears that frontier AI companies, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, may be quietly using their customers’ intellectual property to improve their models. Some executives worry that using AI models from these companies will eventually result in their “secret sauce” leaking to competitors—or worse, that OpenAI and Anthropic will build products that directly compete with them. The biggest controversy came in June, when Anthropic began mandating a 30-day retention policy for all chats with its most powerful AI models, Fable and Mythos. Many companies had an “almost allergic reaction” to this, says a source who advises clients on becoming AI-native, speaking under the condition of anonymity because his company works closely with Anthropic. Still, many data security experts say the AI companies may have subtler ways to glean insights about how their customers’ operate that can be used to improve future AI models, without having to train directly on the data the models’ are processing. Given these concerns, companies are looking to diversify their AI usage, and reduce their dependency on the leading AI companies. The term du jour for this is “sovereign AI,” referring to a company’s ability to control its own “AI stack”—everything from owning the chips on which AI workloads run, to setting up proprietary cloud infrastructure, to using open-source models that a company can download and run in their own cloud environments. Sovereign AI is a term that has historically been associated with governments, but this year its usage has bled into the corporate world. Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/10/05/openai-and-anthropic-battle-over-zero-data-retention-zdr-data-privacy-companies-look-to-open-models-and-sovereign-ai/ submitted by /u/fortune
Originally posted by u/fortune on r/ArtificialInteligence