OpenAI seems to be silently re-enabling model training on Codex chats

1 points by user052919 ↗ HN
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.

147 comments

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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.

> Not accessible anymore in the menu, and /usage in the codex app now also gives a lot of stats

Codex shows the usage limits on /status - Claude instead does it on /usage.

fwiw I can still see my usage in the Codex app
Mine got move out of the user menu on the lower left to just above the user menu as it's own clickable selection. The other day, I though they took the old quick view of usage away, and started going back to the settings to look. Turns out they just moved it.
If your company actually cared about this they would be running their own inference instead of leaving fate to a couple of checkboxes.
Yeah but how expensive is that vs $20 or 100/month subs?
[delayed]
On the other hand (in particular for smaller companies particularly not in the USA): How much can you afford to pay? Can you actually afford the self-hosted route?
If the IP in question is software code then a lot of companies are overvaluing that at this point.
Yeah, why didn't I think of just spending $30k/month on an inference server and figuring out how to train a 2T parameter model. I clearly don't care about this at all or I would just do that.
> and figuring out how to train a 2T parameter model

Why train your own model? You could use one of the many models already available on HF.

surely because of the speedup of AI, you don't need to figure it out, now claude can train the model for you!!!11
Why do you need to train a model at all?

You surely don't need frontier models for any job that isn't going to replace a human. If the human is still in the loop, just use a model the human can work with. It can be quite small. You could even be running Qwen 3.8 27B for each developer and it would be fine, and you are in control of your own destiny and can make more progressive judgements about things.

I don't really understand how the AI world has caused so much black-and-white thinking to come about. You are not under mortal threat if you don't use the latest models. This is just FUD. You still have people with brains and you might get a better result over the longer term if you use AI to assist them in their choices rather than make them sit there and hit return.

There are cases like this for Chinese models: https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/26/cohere-says-alibabas-qwen-...
Oh, for sure.

But you can't trust any LLM, or any output from any LLM. You need to protect against stuff like this regardless. They could all do it, and quite accidentally. Even an LLM you trained yourself could do this to you, based on the training data and based on RAG.

But if you want to avoid the specific case we are talking about where your inference provider sees everything you do, and ignores your preferences, then running someone's LLM on your own inference is the only way forward.

Its astonishing that anyone thinks that these companies even respect the checkbox. These are some of the objectively scummiest companies on earth that have violated nearly ever copyright law we have
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.
Turn on advanced account security. You should be doing this anyways (requires hardware keys). But it also locks data sharing off.
Unfortunately, they are also changing that a bit:

> Thank you for using Daybreak Blue and for being part of our Trusted Access program. We are reaching out to notify you of an upcoming change to how your Daybreak Trusted Access data may be used. Daybreak use requires you to enroll in Advanced Account Security, which turns off the “improve the model for everyone” setting. However, from November 29, we may use content from Daybreak Blue sessions on personal accounts to improve our models, including to help strengthen safeguards against cyber misuse. We will use Daybreak Blue interactions for these purposes, even when the “improve the model for everyone” setting is off.

Interesting. I am not in Daybreak so this isn't an issue for me right now, but points to one more reason to switch away from Closed AI and Anthropic.
Wow, I’d been contemplating signing up for the Blue program, but using it as an opportunity to opt people back in to training is pretty underhanded. I guess I’ll be sticking to the friendly neighbourhood Chinese guy in a trench coat whenever I want to do any security work.
They sent a follow up email saying you can opt-out
Don't trust this company.
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.
If you really care, sign a ZDR contract with OpenAI or use Bedrock or something.
If you *really* care, run your own inference. Everything else is just wishful thinking and/or convenience winning over self-sovereignty.
you cant do it for personal subs with oai or ant no?
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.

They do kind of have to eat their own dogfood (or at least pretend to publically), you do wonder if they'll be an interesting public example of choking on that dogfood at some point.
The frontier labs are entirely AI generated at this point. By entirely I mean ~100% of the code and supplementary training pipelines are AI created, with ZERO human guidance or oversight. And compare the results, look at Opus 5.5 vs the original Opus (which was human made). See the difference?

In fact, my personal prediction is that OpenAI and Anthropic will let go of all their human employees by Q1 2027.

> See the difference?

There are a lot of views on current AI progress amongst smart people. Not everyone is convinced they are improved in all areas. What specific difference are you gesturing at? the improved coding performance? differences in writing style? Agentic ability?

> 99.9% certain not a single human being has a deep understanding of what is going on with the Codex app anymore

Because humans actually don't have the ability to.

Malice and stupidity reinforce each other. If you find yourself unable to determine which one is causing the issue, run.
That quote isn't reasonable when there are profound economic incentives to do the malicious thing.
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

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.

My personal view on this is that there are enough people who need this to not be happening or who would be very happy to catch any of the major frontier model providers fibbing about it, that needles are constantly being added to the haystack and searched for in subsequent models and requests made to them.

Proof of training or RAG search on data that was private would be a huge smoking gun and would change usage habits overnight.

(comment deleted)
No one is really watching and frankly if they were using it for training showing they did so without someone internally blowing the whistle is downright impossible. Corporate/gov malfeasance happens all the time, with ample of internal support and re-affirmation. Historically few of the parties involved who stand to benefit ever become whistleblowers. Even when they do, often the world yawns and nothing changes. Truth is, when it comes to this topic of data acquisition for training, these companies are on a tight rope of needing to acquire an edge over their competitors while not having an unlimited mine to mine from. So the incentive to "use everything" is much greater than the potential danger of users raising issues they cannot reasonably prove or show harm from.

Take Tristan Buckmaster, he is asserting OAI may have used his data to arrive at their proof. They initially said they couldn't say and then they amended their statement. So it's their word against his, but they showed no evidence and invited exactly zero independent 3rd parties to attest to this. Buckmaster would likely have to sue them to hopefully force their hand by court order. From our purview, he likely won't pursue legal counsel and OAI won't admit to using unauthorized content to train their models. We should likely accept that all AI corporations are using all data available to them full stop.

Think about it, these model interactions have been the frontier of human feedback across all disciplines and modalities. The sheer immensity of data flowing into their servers of human original content (with feedback) is likely much greater than what they scraped from the web or are continuing to scrape. Entire codebases being shared, entire business processes, reasoning behind said processes and a load of industry specific secrets have likely been shared in the interactions. The rise of agents with sub-agents each with minimal guardrails have gifted the models with the ability to exfiltrate all this data with the user consent and a minimal non-enforceable "do not train" check-mark that the unsuspecting user is unlikely to be able to show any harm later.

Their acquisition techniques prior to larger user bases included ample piracy. Anthropic (the holier than thou of the two) itself, has had to settle at $1.5b for using pirated books in training, why wouldn't they use every available avenue to help their models improve today legal or otherwise?

If data is being sent over the wire, assume someone is going to use it to improve their models. They all include a clause of 30-Day retention on pretty much on all user data to ensure "abuse" isn't happening. So they are using it, and telling you about it, not using data for model improvement is just cope for the user.

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.
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.

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!

mine wasn't reenabled
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.
it's actually fascinating that so many corporations are just willing to give up their entire intellectual properties, real & imagined, to a third party because it might let them remove a percent of their work force. Especially when told "it can do it", and they dont fill in the "without you".

I've no doubt, Palentir's forward deployed engineers will essentially operate like the borg and turn companies into defacto subjugated properties.

They already do. Outside of tiny companies the norm is block all AI across the board if they have the IT staff that knows how. From what I've seen, large enterprise companies are still testing the waters outside of dev/IT use.
Surely the solution to this kind of thing is to sue or make police report, or at least to have ones lawyers contact theirs?
So, you are paranoid about leaking IP to the frontier labs, but you are using their remote black boxed services? What a solid logic.
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.

I think this is the new Claude Code in-session suggestions for feedback - I think they generate in-session even though they're unsubmittable for the org. Kind of bad UX.
The absolute worst and the reason I switched from Anthropic to Codex. Codex caught wind of it of course and now they do use the unsuspecting message: We are reviewing this request (do you mean hoping to train on it? or reviewing?) and if you would like to use a different model, press the "any" key. I wonder if they collect the data they make a point to collect, that would make so much sense ... we need to speak out against these type of data collection patterns. Terrible UX and a dark pattern for them to use the same "accept" buttons of 1, 2, 3 etc. The irony is that THESE feedback messages are the sole thing driving me to consider running open source models locally.
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."

> ... while keeping in mind that Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has been credibly accused of raping his sister."

He what now?

EDIT: I did a quick Google. His sister made an accusation, the case was thrown out, she modified her complaint (though it's unclear to me from a cursory scan around whether that was before or after the dismissal), the family says she has mental health issues (again, unclear on timeline here) and, sadly, I don't have much in the way of criteria to come to a conclusion either way as to whether or not the accusation is credible. The fact the case has been thrown out suggests not though.

> The fact the case has been thrown out suggests not though

A billionaire managing to get a case dismissed in the US legal system hardly suggests an accusation has no merit.

His sister claims all of the big social media companies are conspiring against her in an attempt to help Altman.
It's not hard to imagine how a person who suffered legitimate abuse at the hands of one of the most influential people on earth could develop this kind of paranoia.

It's only slightly harder to imagine that the tech oligarchy really is conspiring against her.

To be fair the club is pretty small, I'm pretty sure they keep in touch.
So, if you were accused of raping someone, you should just suck it up and go to jail and just because you have money, you are guilty, right? Not supporting Sam here, but this kind of thinking sets a dangerous precedent.
No, that's why the trial was invented.
It just means what they said, that if you're a billionaire, getting a case thrown out in a country like the USA, shouldn't get you any points regarding to common people's belief if you're guilty or not.

That's just how it is. In the US he gets to not go to jail in a justice system where nobody believes he's actually innocent, because he has money.

So, you're saying you care about social media perception rather than actual justice? That checks out..
> This isn’t the only legal case Annie has been fighting against Sam and her other relatives in recent years. She also successfully sued the family over money left by the Altman siblings’ late father, Jerry Altman, that the family withheld from her for several years.

The family has a grind to pick against her and is defending their golden child.

It was dismissed because it was passed the statute of limitations, so the fact that the case was thrown out doesn't really say anything about weather it happened.
Seems like it will be impossible to know either way. Unfortunate situation no matter the truth
Interesting: yeah, that does rather change the interpretation.
The legal bar for a criminal trial is significantly higher than "credible".
There's also a case of accusation by a murdered ex-open ai employee who was set to testify against copyright in a openai case. That poor soul's mom has been hateful against Sam since.
They will just send your chat to the police or just ban you
I saw something recently about indie devs naming variables after such subjects, such as 'let nuclear_missile_building_guide = 42' specifically so LLMs will refuse to work if they load the code, as an anti-piracy measure
Why not legitimately wonder about the idea of CLOUD in general? How is GPT chat different from Gmail of MS Office holding on a lot of sensitive data. LLM-shops are not as trustworthy as cloud providers?
> How is GPT chat different from Gmail of MS Office holding on a lot of sensitive data. LLM-shops are not as trustworthy as cloud providers?

Every LLM company is built on taking a fast-and-loose approach to intellectual property.

Why should the purported legal protections on my LLM conversations be any different to the purported legal protections on those pirated ebooks, scraped newspaper websites, scraped photos, and suchlike?

I agree, the LLM market has a shady notion in the root of its story. It's like when you go to a circus, and you realize how much of it is built around suffering of tamed animals

Some of LLM-shops have higher standards, and maybe because of that their progress is slower (example: Google)

just do the tradeoff - learn a lot of stuff vs the risk of <what exactly? - see related examples in the industry;>
I agree. Can't take seriously any word from a guy who was sued by his own sister over abuse.

Not even sure if it happened or not but can we trust the system where more expensive lawyers means you win even if it is not right