AI Exposure · AI chatbot
What Claude actually does with your data
Anthropic's chatbot. The same personal versus organisational story as the others, with the training question put to you as a setting.
- Trains on your data
- Depends on account and setting
- Processed
- Not clearly published
- Can you turn it off
- Not for personal accounts
- Verified
- 2 July 2026, against Anthropic's published documents
What AI is in it?
- The chat itself. Whatever someone types, pastes or uploads goes to Anthropic's servers to be answered, the same shape as ChatGPT and Gemini.
Does your data train AI models?
Depends on account and setting.
On personal accounts, Free, Pro and Max, chats are used to improve Anthropic's models if the person allows it. The setting is called Model Improvement, under Privacy Settings.
Incognito chats are never used for training even when the setting is on, and conversations flagged for safety review may still be looked at to enforce Anthropic's usage policy.
On the business side, Claude for Work, Team, Enterprise and the API, Anthropic's stated default is: "By default, we will not use your inputs or outputs from our commercial products to train our models." Feedback you send, on any plan, is the exception, and is kept for up to five years.
Where is your data processed?
Not clearly published.
The training pages I read do not state where a personal account's chats are processed.
Anthropic is an American company, so the working assumption for a UK charity is the United States. This is one to ask the vendor directly. If a clear page appears, I will cite it here.
What changes between free and paid?
The account is the story.
The pattern is the same as every chatbot in this directory: a member of staff on a personal Claude account is a consumer, with settings your organisation cannot see or change.
The business plans exist to change that, and on Team and Enterprise an administrator can, for example, switch off feedback submission for the whole organisation.
Can your organisation turn it off?
Not for personal accounts.
Personal accounts belong to the person: the Model Improvement setting, Incognito use and everything else is theirs to decide. Team and Enterprise plans add organisation-level settings under an agreement your charity actually holds.
What does this mean for the people you support?
A chatbot is a chatbot: it only sees what someone gives it, and people give it a lot.
The specific habit to watch is the helpful one, a caseworker or fundraiser pasting real records in to save time, on an account nobody in your organisation controls, whichever vendor's logo is on it.
What to check this week
- Check the setting on personal accounts. Anyone using Claude for anything work adjacent should open Privacy Settings and check Model Improvement, and know that Incognito chats are excluded from training either way.
- Keep real records out of personal accounts. The rule is the same across ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude: no beneficiary, donor or staff records into an account your organisation does not hold, whatever the settings say.
- Give regular users a proper home. If people rely on it, Claude for Work or a private alternative puts the use under your organisation's own agreement, with admin controls and a no-training default.
Sources
Everything above is my plain English reading of what Anthropic publishes. The originals:
- Anthropic: Is my data used for model training? (consumer) reviewed 2 July 2026
- Anthropic: Is my data used for model training? (commercial) reviewed 2 July 2026
Vendors change these documents quietly and often. If you spot something out of date, email me and I'll re-verify the entry.
What this page cannot tell you
This page can tell you what Claude does with what goes into it. It cannot tell you what goes into it at your organisation, and that is the half that matters.
The answers above kept splitting on whose account it is, and the free personal kind is invisible to you: it shows up in no system you run and on no bill you pay, and nobody declares it on a survey.
So the next step is not a setting. It is finding out what is being pasted, by whom, from which accounts, which is what a discovery is for. And your team needs a rule clearer than "be careful", which my free Charity AI Policy Generator writes with you in a few minutes.
See your whole toolkit at once
This page covers one tool. The AI Exposure Report Generator covers your toolkit: tick the tools your charity uses and get one report showing what the AI inside each of them does with your data, as a Word document you can table at your next meeting. Free, and nothing you tick leaves your browser.
The Report Generator, start to finish: tick your tools, read your exposure, download the report.
Read the other tools
The same questions, answered for every tool in the directory.
Your office suite
Microsoft 365 Copilot
The AI inside Word, Excel, Outlook and Teams. It can reach whatever the signed in person can reach.
Verified 2 July 2026 →
Google Workspace with Gemini
Gemini inside Gmail, Docs, Drive and Meet. Google says your content is not used to train models outside your domain. What it can reach is the longer answer.
Verified 3 July 2026 →AI chatbots
ChatGPT
The one your staff are probably already using. What happens to what they type depends entirely on whose account it is.
Verified 2 July 2026 →
Google Gemini
Google's chatbot, one tap away on Android phones, in Chrome and in search. On a personal account, the training switch is on until someone finds it.
Verified 2 July 2026 →
Claude
Anthropic's chatbot. The same personal versus organisational story as the others, with the training question put to you as a setting.
You are hereMeeting notetakers
Otter.ai
The notetaker that joins your meetings, and can invite itself to the next one. What it hears may help train its AI.
Verified 2 July 2026 →
Microsoft Teams
The meeting recorder your charity already owns. Everything it captures becomes a file in OneDrive and SharePoint, where the rest of the AI can reach it.
Verified 3 July 2026 →
Zoom AI Companion
The AI inside the video calls much of the sector runs on. Zoom's no training promise is unusually specific, and there is a reason it is worded that way.
Verified 2 July 2026 →
Fathom
The free notetaker that arrives one personal install at a time. The recordings live in the US, and the training answer has two halves.
Verified 3 July 2026 →Charity CRMs
Beacon
A UK charity CRM with AI on every plan since 2024. Beacon publishes where your data sits and how to switch the AI off, which leaves one question to ask them directly.
Verified 2 July 2026 →
Donorfy
A UK charity CRM where the AI mostly arrives through the side door: optional integrations. What you connect decides where your supporter data goes.
Verified 2 July 2026 →
CiviCRM
The open source CRM ships no AI of its own. What that is worth to you depends on which CiviCRM you are running: one your organisation hosts, or a hosted product somebody sells you. Everything below splits along that line.
Verified 20 July 2026 →
Salesforce
In much of the sector through ten free licences. The AI paperwork is detailed and mostly reassuring, with one default that runs the other way.
Verified 3 July 2026 →Accounts
Xero
Your accounts package now has an assistant called JAX. Xero says your data is not used to train its AI, and names the AI companies your questions travel to.
Verified 20 July 2026 →
QuickBooks
Intuit's accounts package now has an assistant throughout. Its privacy statement says your information is used to train its AI models, and it says so in as many words.
Verified 3 July 2026 →Marketing and design
Mailchimp
Your supporter mailing list lives here, and Mailchimp belongs to Intuit now, which means the same small print as QuickBooks covers it.
Verified 3 July 2026 →
Canva
The design tool half the sector lives in, free through Canva for Nonprofits. Whether your uploads help train AI depends on whose account they sit in.
Verified 3 July 2026 →