Who can see your prompts? Privacy, retention and where a provider lives

When you rent inference, your prompts pass through someone else's machines. Whether that matters depends on three questions people tend to blur into one — and they have different answers at the same provider.

One: is your traffic used for training? Some providers train on what you send through free tiers or consumer apps; paid API traffic usually carries a written promise not to. The word that matters is written — a policy page you can cite, not a vibe. Our provider pages show the training answer where a provider states one, and show unknown as unknown: a blank is never a promise.

Two: how long is it kept? Separate from training. Most providers log requests for some window — often for abuse monitoring — and some offer a zero-retention option where prompts are processed and dropped. The retention window and the zero-retention mark are on our provider pages where the provider publishes them. If neither of you can point at a number, assume logs exist.

Three: who can make them hand it over? This is the one people underweight, and it follows the company, not the servers. A US-incorporated provider can be compelled under US law (the CLOUD Act) to produce data under its control wherever it is stored — a US company's EU region is still a US company. An EU-headquartered provider running EU infrastructure answers to a different legal order entirely. That is the honest version of "EU hosting": the flag on the data centre matters less than the flag on the company. Server location still matters for latency and for some compliance regimes — it just is not the whole answer.

What to actually do. For genuinely sensitive material — client work, health, anything you'd redact — the clean answer is not sending it anywhere: a local model has no third question. For everything else, pick a provider whose written policy answers all three questions, prefer the zero-retention option where one exists, and treat any unanswered question as a no. The same open model is often served by many providers at similar prices — when the model is equal, the policy is the product.

Where next: Compare providers · When to run models locally · What a provider is