What a private AI chat can and can’t hide
ChatGPT's Temporary Chat and Claude's incognito chats keep a conversation out of your history and memory, and neither gets used for training. But OpenAI says it may keep a copy…
By Sophie Bennett
ChatGPT's Temporary Chat and Claude's incognito chats keep a conversation out of your history and memory, and neither gets used for training. But OpenAI says it may keep a copy for up to 30 days for safety, and Anthropic keeps incognito chats for 30 days by default. You're also signed in to your account the whole time, and on Claude's Team and Enterprise plans, incognito chats are included in data exports for account owners. So they hide the chat from your history, not from the company. The most private option is running a model locally. Your prompts never leave your computer and there's no account involved. Tools like Ollama and LM Studio make the setup pretty easy, and open models like Qwen and DeepSeek are free to download. The catch is hardware: small models run on a decent laptop, but the bigger ones need a strong GPU or a lot of memory. And no local setup g…
It is part of a broader wave of investment and competition across the AI industry, as companies race to turn research progress into shipped products.
