It’s interesting all the focus on opt-out from training. Sometimes I worry there is an intentional focus on that so people don’t think about the other ways the company might be profiting off our data. Like I pay for Anthropic and they don’t train on that but are they selling my “anonymized” usage data in some other way?
From what I recall, these companies don't offer any option to opt out of your session transcript data being used (and sold!) for "regular" adtech targeting purposes.
Anthropic explicitly state that they don't do this, even if you use the free plan and even if you don't opt-out of letting them use your data for training:
That answers for the "sold" part but not for the "used" part.
I.e. nothing about this statement prevents Anthropic from running ads within Claude, as long as they run the ad-placement auctions themselves, and so aren't leaking any of the data they're using to decide which placements are relevant to which users+sessions. (This is the same thing Google does for SERP ad auctions.)
But actually, and perhaps more interestingly, nothing about this statement prevents Anthropic from building a Google AdSense competitor either. Other sites (or mobile apps, etc) could plop in an Anthropic ad iframe; and it'd be Anthropic's knowledge of your interactions with Claude that would drive what ads would show up in that iframe. The embedding site doesn't know what ads the users are seeing, so that's still not "selling users' data to third parties", per se.
