A training opt-out is a setting or contractual term that excludes your conversations from being used to train or fine-tune an AI provider's models. With it in place, your prompts may still be processed to answer you — but they are not fed back into the next version of the model.
Opt-out vs. opt-in: the default matters
The key question is what happens if you do nothing. Many consumer AI products are effectively opt-in: your conversations are used for model improvement unless you find and disable the relevant control (often labelled something like "improve the model for everyone" in the data settings). Business and API tiers are typically the opposite — training is excluded by default under the provider's terms. So "we don't train on your data" means very different things depending on which door you came through.
Opt-out is not deletion, and not zero retention
A training opt-out only addresses training. It usually does not remove your past conversations, and it does not mean the provider stops storing them — chats can be retained and human-reviewable even when they are excluded from training. Storage is a separate question (see zero-retention API), and so is deletion. Our 2026 data-retention audit tracks training, retention, and human access as three independent columns for exactly this reason.
How Secret Chat AI handles training
Secret Chat AI opts out of third-party training across the providers it routes to, so your prompts are not used to train or fine-tune the models — you do not have to hunt for a setting to make that true. Combined with local-only history and anonymized, email-only sessions, that is part of the site's core promise: it does not profile you, and nothing you ask trains a model. See the full picture on the home page.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Does opting out of training delete my past conversations?
Usually not. A training opt-out generally applies going forward and does not erase data already collected. Deleting past conversations is a separate action from opting out of training.
- If I opt out of training, is my data still stored?
It can be. Opting out of training does not automatically stop retention — a provider may still store and even human-review chats it has excluded from training. Retention and training are separate guarantees.
- Does Secret Chat AI train on my chats?
No. Secret Chat AI opts out of third-party training across the providers it uses, so your prompts are never used to train or fine-tune the models.
Related terms: Zero-Retention API · BAA · all glossary terms