When you use AI for work—writing code, analyzing documents, brainstorming ideas—you’re sharing something valuable. Your intellectual property, your process, your thinking. The question we ask ourselves constantly at Chat-O is: who owns that value?
Our answer is simple: you do.
Most people don’t realize that when they use AI tools, their conversations might be used to train future models. It’s buried in terms of service, hidden behind vague language like “improving our services” or “quality assurance.”
Here’s what that can mean in practice:
For individual hobbyists, maybe this is fine. For professionals? For businesses? It’s a non-starter.
When we say a model on Chat-O is “high privacy,” we mean:
Your conversations are processed only to generate responses. They’re never used to train or fine-tune AI models. This is guaranteed in the provider’s terms of service—we don’t just take their word for it, we verify it.
We keep conversation history so you can reference past chats, but we don’t use it for analytics, pattern detection, or any purpose beyond serving you directly.
Your data doesn’t get shared with advertisers, data brokers, or other third parties. It’s used for one thing: answering your questions.
We only work with AI providers who explicitly commit to these standards in their commercial terms. If a provider’s privacy policy is vague or problematic, we don’t add their models—no matter how good they are.
Being strict about privacy creates real challenges:
Sometimes a model everyone’s excited about doesn’t meet our privacy bar. We have to say no, even when it would be easy to add and users would love it.
Privacy-respecting API access often costs more than bulk deals that include data sharing clauses. We absorb that cost because we think it’s the right thing to do.
Vetting a new provider’s privacy commitments takes time. Reading terms of service, consulting with experts, verifying claims. We’d be faster if we skipped this step.
Certain features—like training custom models on your conversations or offering “personalization” that requires long-term data analysis—aren’t compatible with strict privacy. We choose privacy over features.
Because trust is the foundation of everything.
When you’re debugging production code at 2am, you need to trust that your architecture isn’t leaking to competitors. When you’re brainstorming a startup idea, you need to trust that it stays yours. When you’re analyzing sensitive business data, you need to trust that it’s not becoming training data for a model someone else will use.
We want Chat-O to be the place where you can work with AI without that nagging worry in the back of your mind: “Should I really be putting this in here?”
You might wonder: “If OpenAI’s free ChatGPT tier uses my data for training, but Chat-O doesn’t, how can you afford it?”
Fair question. Here’s our approach:
We charge for usage: Our credit system means heavy users pay more, which subsidizes lighter users. This is more sustainable than ad-supported or data-harvesting models.
We’re efficient: By supporting multiple models, we can route queries to cost-effective options when appropriate, keeping our costs down.
We’re transparent: We’d rather have a sustainable, paid model than a “free” model that monetizes through your data.
The good news? Privacy is becoming a competitive advantage in AI, not just a cost.
More providers are offering “no training” tiers. More businesses are demanding privacy guarantees. More regulation is coming that will mandate these protections.
We’re not prophets—we just started early. What seems like a principled stance today might be table stakes tomorrow.
Don’t just take our word for it:
Read provider terms: We link to the terms of service for each model provider. Check for yourself what they commit to.
Ask us questions: If you’re unsure about how we handle data, ask. We’re transparent about our practices.
Review your data: You can export your entire Chat-O history at any time. Your data is yours—act like it.
Privacy protections are important, but they’re not magic:
We can’t prevent AI providers from logging API calls for abuse detection and service reliability. But we can ensure those logs aren’t used for training.
We can’t control what you choose to share. If you paste your entire codebase into a chat, that’s your call—but we’ll never use it without your permission.
We can’t guarantee anonymity. You have an account, you pay for usage. We know who you are in that sense. But your conversation content stays private.
Building a privacy-first AI platform means:
We think it’s worth it. Because AI is too powerful, and too personal, to build any other way.
Want to work with AI without worrying about privacy? Try Chat-O—your data stays yours.