If prompts were submitted earlier than that and training was not opted out, there's a chance they made their way into our training pipeline in some form. But this would be a droplet in an ocean and unlikely to have made any difference, imo.
See: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/10/science/tristan-buckmaste...
Any ideas of things we could do to make it clearer?
Option 1 is not. In part because it is opt-out (will it turn back on on its own like my Facebook privacy settings?), and not always respected (sending feedback can mean your chat is used?). Also because disabling "Improve model for everyone" is very vague.
There simply needs to be a setting like "my data is confidential", in which case there clear guarantees like there are for ZDR.
As an example, I've seen people speculate that while input prompts and output tokens are discarded, thinking traces are retained for training, which could leak information. I doubt this is true, but it shows that the policy is not unambiguous and reassuring enough to remove all doubt.
Thanks for asking.