Everywhere else in Anthropic's interface, yes/no switches show blue when enabled and black when disabled. In the box they're showing about this change the slider shows grey in both states: visit it in preferences to see the difference! It's not just disappointing but also kind of sad that someone went to the effort to do this.

> opt-in by default

Nitpicking: “opt in by default” doesn’t exist, it’s either “opt in”, or “opt out”; this is “opt out”. By definition an “opt out” setting is selected by default.

"five year retention". If it's in a model once, it's there forever.

I got a pop-up when I opened the app explaining the change and an option to opt out. That seems very transparent to me.

The 5 year is the real kicker. Over the next 5 years I find it doubtful that they won't keep modifying their TOS and presenting that opt out 'option' so that all it will take is one accidental click and they have all your data from the start. Also, what is to stop them from removing the opt out? Nothing says they have to give that option. 4 years and 364 days from now TOS change with no opt out and a retention increase to 10 years. By then the privacy decline will have already have been so huge nobody will even notice that this 'option' was never even real.

> You can opt out

You can say that you want to opt out. What Anthropic will decide to do with your declaration is a different question.

I'm super duper sure that my data won't be stored and eventually used if i opt out

What will you use instead? I’m finding Claude the best experience since ChatGPT 5 is so slow and not any better answers than 4.

You can request your data to not be used. Your request will appropriately be read and redirected to /dev/null.

it's almost like this multi billion dollar company is misanthropic, despite their platitudes. Should I not hold my breath on Anthropic helping facilitate "an era of AI abundance for all"? (To quote a rejected PR applicant to Anthropic from the front page)

Settings > Privacy > Privacy Settings

> It was the kick in the pants I needed to cancel my subscription.

As if barely two 9s of uptime wasn't enough.

I wonder what happens if I don't accept the new T&C? I've been successfully dismissing an updated T&C prompt in a popular group messaging application for years -- I lack the time and legal acumen to process it -- without issue.

Also, for others who want to opt-out, the toggle is in the T&C modal itself.

Has anyone asked why OpenAI has two very separate opt-out mechanisms (one in settings, the other via a formal request that you need to lodge via their privacy or platform page)? That always seemed likely to me to be hiding a technicality that allows them to train on some forms of user data.

OpenAIs temporary chat still advertises that chats are stored for 30 days while there is court order that everything must be retained indefinitely. I wonder why they are not obligated to state this quite extreme retention.

Are you sure the opt out isn’t only training? The retention does not seem affected by the toggle.

What are you replacing it with?

> Claude assists me in my math research.

> Claude then suggests these same ideas to someone else, who legitimately believes this is now their work.

Won't this mean that claude assisted you with someone else work? Sure it's not from a "chat" but claude doesn't really know anything other than it's training data

To clarify, I see AI as an association engine of immense scope. Others are responding with variations on this model in mind.

It has long been a problem in math research to distinguish between "no one has had this idea" and "one person has had this idea". This used to take months. With the internet and MathSciNet, ArXiv online it took many iterations of guessing keywords. Now, I've spent six months learning how to coax rare responses from AI. That's not everyone's use case.

What complicates this is AI's ability to generalize. My best paper, we imagined we were expressing in print what everyone was thinking, when we were in fact connecting the dots on an idea that was latent. This is an interesting paradox: People see you as most original when you're least original, but you're helping them think.

With the right prompts AI can also "connect the dots".

When you get the pop-up about the new terms, select the “opt out” option. Then your chats will not be used for training.

If your work was truly novel, wouldn't the odds of it showing up in later models be extremely low given that these are probabilistic?

In a sense these machines are outputting the aggregate of the collective thoughts of the commons. In order for concepts to be output they have to be quite common in the training data. Which works out kind of nice for privacy and innovation because by the time concepts are common enough to show up through inference they probably deserve to be part of the public knowledge (IP aside).

This perfectly describes one of the biggest dillema with AI. Where does an AI company stop to utilize human knowledge it does not actually own. Where do they draw the line. Apparently it's possible there aren't any lines drawn at all.

If you talk to a human they're free to discuss your ideas with someone else. Why should LLMs be any different? The likelihood of these models reproducing your ideas word for word is essentially zero anyway.

More to the point, respecting your wishes to keep those conversations confidential would risk stifling human progress, so they have to be disregarded for the greater good.

A lot of people doing cat-and-mouse threat detection development are keeping their work outside of public LLMs right now, so it sounds like you’re in the same boat as a lot of us.

> Claude assists me in my math research.

Pulling up the ladder behind you :-)

Math research or anything new/clever in a particular niche. Imagine you optimized a piece of code to get an advantage or came up with some clever trick to solve a common problem in your niche and then everyone gets it from free from Claude believing, as you pointed out, that it's now their work.

I had this exact conversation with my business partner a few days ago. Our "secret sauce" might not be worth that much after many years but still I am not comfortable exposing it to Claude. Fortunately it's very easy to separate in our project so Claude gets the other parts and is very helpful.

> They need data, and they want YOUR data, now, and are gonna do increasingly shady things to get it.

But unlike the 100s of data brokers that also want your data, they have an existing operational funnel of your data already that you voluntary give them every day. All they need is dark pattern ToS changes and manage the minor PR issue. People will forget about this in a week.

It's nice to see the newer models are suffering after being exposed to training on their own slop.

If they had done this in a more measured way they might have been able to separate human from AI content such as doing legal deals with publishers.

However they couldn't wait to just take it all to be first and now the well is poisoned for everyone.

It's not alleged that they stole the content. They told the courts they pirated the materials.

Yeah, this is hardly surprising.

To AI companies, data is even more of a gold mine than to adtech companies. It is existentially important.

The truly evil behavior will emerge at the intersection of these two industries. I'm sure Google and Facebook are already using data from one to power the other, even if it's currently behind closed doors. I can hardly wait for the use cases these geniuses will think of once this is publicly acceptable and in widespread use by all companies.

Further proof why guardrails/regulation is needed.

Gmail used to serve ads based on your emails for many years until 2017. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/26/534451513...

> Am I missing something?

I think you do:

According to the article https://www.perplexity.ai/page/anthropic-reverses-privacy-st...

"Enterprise and educational customers will continue operating under their existing privacy protections, as the policy changes specifically exclude Claude for Work and Claude for Education services. These commercial accounts remain governed by separate contractual agreements that maintain stricter data handling standards.

Organizations using Claude through business partnerships or educational licenses can continue their operations without concern for the new training policies affecting their sensitive communications or proprietary information."

Thus, I think your claim

> What a shoot your own foot business decision.

likely does not hold: the non-commercial accounts likely led to Anthropic loosing money, so they are not liked by Anthropic anyway (but are a an "inconvenient necessity" to get people to notice and try out your product offering). With this new decision, Anthropic makes this "free-riding" less attractive.

I bet that Anthropic will soon release a press statement (that exists in the drawers for quite a long time) "We are listening to your concerns, and will thus extend our 'privacy-conscious offering' to new groups of customers. Only 30 $ per month."

This data is useful for reinforcement learning. All the others do it.

And most importantly, you can just opt-out.

What a framing. Like there is exactly a surprise behing all these reactions.

Google mines the bejeezus out of your email, and uses it to any number of ends, including manipulating you into buying things, and also passing your correspondence on to the US government. While this is not the same as outright making your emails universally searchable - training Claude on your emails is also not the same as posting their contents.

And - this behavior of Google's has not been penalized, I'm afraid.

The LLM equivalent is what Google does do, which is train its spam filters on the contents of your emails coupled to the signal of what human beings flag as spam.

(It was one of the first significant value-adds of GMail: at its scale, Google could create a global-concept understanding of the content and pattern of spam across hundreds of millions of users. That was the kind of Big Data that made it possible to build filters where one could confidently say "This is tuned on all spam in the wild, because we've seen all spam in the wild").

Okay they're not going to be learning in real time. Its not like you're getting your data stolen and then getting something out of it - you're not. What you're talking about is context.

Data gathered for training still has to be used in training, i.e. a new model that, presumably, takes months to develop and train.

Not to mention your drop-in-the-bucket contribution will have next to no influence in the next model. It won't catch things specific to YOUR workflow, just common stuff across many users.

They wouldn’t be able to learn much from interactions anyway.

Learning metric won’t be you, it will be some global shitty metric that will make the service mediocre with time.

Or get more value from the users with the same subscription price. I doubt they are giving any discounts.

I think I'd have more understanding for this position if I thought that these companies were still fundamentally interested in serving their users. They are not. Any information you provide is more likely to be used against your interests (even if that's "just" targeting you with some ads for a scammy product) than for your benefit.

Basically all AI companies are fruit from the same VC-poisoned tree and I expect these products will get worse and more user-hostile as they try to monetize. We're currently living in the "MoviePass"[1] era of AI where users are being heavily subsidized to try to gain market share. It will not last and the potential for abuse is enormous.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MoviePass

Its incredible to me how seriously people can hold an opinion they've so clearly critically interrogated so little.

Try living in a place with privatised health insurance and you'll quickly see why medical data is some of the most important to keep private.

Are you trolling us or do you live in a hypothetical world where companies have our best interests in heart?

My life does in fact have priorities above ”LLMs should work a bit better”.

Have you considered the drawbacks of sharing your data to the most unscrupulous people on this planet?

Are you okay getting ads for shit holistic medication because you had a mental health conversation with AI?

You can train commercial AI with your data right now without screwing over everyone else on the planet. It's easy, just publish your entire trove of personal data on a website and AI crawlers will happily gobble it all up. You can publish your name, home address, work, government-issued ID, financial transactions, chats, browser history, location history, surveillance footage of your home, all for free. So what are you waiting for? Just do it now if you want to share data that badly, there's no need to wait for the approval of "privacy maximalists."

not remotely worried about leaks, hacks, or sinister usage of your data?

> But there are people out there (myself) that are on the opposite end of the spectrum, and we are mostly ignored by the companies. Companies just assume people only ever want to deny them their data.

What? I think you're exactly the kind of person that companies pay attention to, and why they pull moves like this

I realize this might be satire. If not, you are using the same aggressive strategy of turning the tables as Palantir:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/08/palantir-...

Most people do want to deny their data, as we have recently seen in various DOGE backlashes.

What a ridiculous stance.

Do you lock your front door, or use passwords on any of your accounts? Because what you're essentially saying is that you're OK with strangers having access to your personal information. That's beyond the already flawed "I have nothing to hide" argument.

You should read up on the Dutch Civil Registry and the holocaust in the Netherlands and reevaluate if you are serious. I would love to live in a world where everyone had good intentions and the powers that be wouldn’t abuse data to their ends, we will never live in that world.

I don't think you understand how...humanity works?! Is this deliberate parody?

Abuse of medical data is just the tip of the iceberg here and, at least in the states, privatized healthcare presents all sorts of for-profit pricing abuse scenarios let alone nasty scenarios for social coercion.

This may very well be a rational stance, but either way, wish one could somehow teleport this sentiment to the Cypherpunk mailing list in the 80s/90s. Of all the things they projected, concocted, fought for.. Nothing could truly prepare them for this kind of thing: the final victory of the product over the people, the happy acceptance of surveillance. They were all imagining terrible dystopias garnered from state violence and repression, never could they begin to imagine it could all transpire anyway because people like not having to type their address in!

> The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

> I'm not aware of any major disasters.

Oh boy. Did you somehow miss all the news about data leaks and password dumps etc. being sold on the "dark" web and shit?

Would you mind if I followed you around and noted everything you do and constantly demanded your attention?

The shit done by corporations is akin to a clingy stalker and would be absolutely despised if it was an individual person doing something like that.

As for benefits, which?? In my entire life I have never seen an ad for anything (that I did not already know about via other means) that made me want to look up the product, let alone buy it. Nor do I know anyone who did. In fact, it turns me off from a product if its ad appears too frequently.

Google etc. and various storefronts also almost never recommend me anything that actually matches my interests, beyond just a shallow word similarity, in fact they forcibly shove completely unrelated shit into my searches cause they were paid to. Like searching for RPGs and seeing Candy f'ing Crush.

----

You know what though, I kinda agree with the potential intent behind your charade:

Yes, LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT ME.

I will gladly TELL companies EXACTLY what I like, and I WANT you to use that. Show me other shit that is actually relevant to MY interests instead of the interests of whomever paid you to shove their shit into my face.

ASK! DON'T SPY! Because you can't ever get it right anyway!

>LLM's probably won't get significantly better without this data.

Who told you LLMs will get significantly better with this data? Sam Altman?

It is a great thing if it were reciprocated. But when I'm paying $20/mo to access Claude, why should I give training data to Anthropic for free?

You mean collectively allow us to train Claude's llm? Pretty big omission there

Proprietary data (your company's app repository, a script for upcoming movie) and sensitive data (health, finance) become exposed

It's not clear that most people will benefit from LLMs getting significantly better. It's looking more like a net negative.

I'm okay with LLMs not getting better.

> LLM's probably won't get significantly better without this data.

Yeah and Facebook couldn't scale without ignoring the harms it causes people. Should we just let that be? Society seems to think so but I don't think it's a good idea at all.

> That said I do recognize the risk of only a handful of companies being responsible for something as important as the collective knowledge of civilization.

It's not just the risk of irresponsible behaviour (which is extremely important in a situation with so much power imbalance)

It's also just the basic properties of monopolistic markets: the smaller the number of producers, the closer the equilibrium price of the good maximizes the producers' economic surplus.

These companies operate for-profit in a market, and so they will naturally trend toward capturing as much value as they can, at the expense of everyone else.

If every business in the world depends on AI, this effectively becomes a tax on all business activity.

This is obviously not in the collective interest.

Of course, this analysis makes simplifying assumptions about the oligopoly. The reality is much worse: the whole system creates an inherent information asymmetry. Try and imagine what the "optimal" pricing strategy is for a product where the producer knows intimate details about every consumer.

This is all you can do. Laws and regulations will not be forthcoming, and even if some are, they will be ignored or the fines paid as a cost of doing business.

Any data you give to any website or app is no longer (exclusively) yours. Use these services under that assumption.

As long as you can opt-out it doesn't bother me much. Though it does make me wonder those third party clients that people subscribe to e.g. JetBrains AI, Zed, and others that use Claude and other Anthropic models, do they opt-in for you? Because that would be bad.

I would strongly argue that API clients should NEVER be opted in for these sorts of things, and it should be like this industry wide.

> An in-app notification pop-up will alert you to the change. You can opt out in the pop up.

The in-app notification that I got was a pop up which contained some buttons and some images. There was no text. Just in case it was some dark mode issue I checked the DOM and I couldn't find any text there either. I just clicked outside the modal and it went away. I assumed it was some announcement about some new feature and ignored it.

I did end up seeing the news yesterday in Reddit (I'm having issues getting the research tool to actually being used, tried to see if there was some recent changes) but it's unlikely that I was the only one who experienced modal the issue & if those didn't follow the tech news they could easily miss the change.

My comment doesn’t make sense but it’s too late to edit. To clarify: The original link was to a perplexity.ai summary of multiple news articles about the change. The mods have changed it now.

The comments here were from people jumping to co conclusions after skimming an AI summary of news articles about the link. I’m glad it got changed.

Crazy that they would automatically link to an AI summary of multiple articles on the topic than the original source?

Why single out user data specifically? Most of the data Anthropic and co train on was just scooped up from wherever with zero consent, not even the courtesy of a buried TOS clause, and their users were always implicitly fine with that. Forgive me for not having much sympathy when the users end up reaping what they've sown.

I think it's cute people believe companies that trained their models with every single book and online page ever written without consents from authors (and often against the explicit request of the author without any opt-out) won't do a rugg-pull and do it also to all the chats they have aquired...

From the actual source ( https://www.anthropic.com/news/updates-to-our-consumer-terms ) they’re going to show a pop-up with the terms change. I triggered it now by going to the Privacy settings page and reviewing the new terms.

It’s quite clear. It’s easy to opt out. They’re making everyone go through it.

It doesn’t reach your threshold of having everyone sign a contract or something, but then again no other online service makes people sign contracts.

> should be considered a serious criminal offense.

On what grounds? They’re showing people the terms. It’s clear enough. People have to accept the terms. We’ve all been accepting terms for software and signing up for things online for decades.

Why? This is not 'use collected information to targed ads', or 'sell collected information to third parties', but 'use collected information from the service to improve the service'. Does not really seems to me much different than ISPs using traffic stats to plan infrastructure improvements, or a website using access logs to improve accessibility and navigation.

And when talking specifically about AI, one could argue that learning from interactions is a common aspect of intelligence, so a casual user who do not understand details about LLMs would expect so anyways. Also, the fact that LLMs (and other neural networks) have distinct training and inference phases seems more like an implementation detail.

It already is. See Art. 5. 1.(b) here: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-5-gdpr/

Make no mistake this will be coming to the team plan. The only difference is your account owner will decide for the whole team.

I would expect that your whole code base would be then used as training data.

I think that it is only a matter of time before they will start reselling these data as exfiltrated IP to whoever will be interested.

Yes, your code is part of the chat context. You cannot use Claude code without sharing your repo with them.

Just unclick the box to opt out. They put it front and center.

I think this is about claude.ai , not Claude Code nor Claude models API (but I'm not 100% sure). So no, unless you copy paste your code into claude.ai

Agree. Out of the available paid cloud providers, I only chose to work with Claude Code because of the data privacy policy. This isn’t a welcome move but still usable. Thankfully the open source models are not far behind with Qwen 3 coder etc.

Gemini allows you to opt out, but disables chat history if you do so

This change didn't grant access to your old chats and can be opted out. Good job you overreacted without reading.

nit / FYI: it's "Stockholm" (as in, the city) not "stock-home".

Also your chats will now be stored for 5 years.

My work just signed to an enterprise agreement with anthropic. I just checked, and "Your data will not be trained on or used to improve the product. Code is stored to personalize your experience. Applies to all team members."

Given how competitive Claude has been with ChatGPT models without training on users I'm curious how useful OpenAI could have found it.

I hope they didn't vibe code the popup, that could be bad if it didn't actually work.

We should be able to train on foundation model outputs.

These bastard companies pirated the world's data, then they train on our personal data. But they have the gall to say we can't save their model's inputs and outputs and distill their models.

Your ideas for other users.

I actively want them to train on my chats because I am like a tendril through which Claude will try to grip the world and rise up further.

This is remarkably specific.

Bro just outed himself. Don’t need Anthropic or LLM companies to do that for you.

The are valued at $170 Billion. Not quite the same as, but in same order of magnitude as OpenAI - while having only a single digit percent fraction of active users. They probably need to prepare for the eventual user data sellout, as it is becoming increasingly more obvious that none of the big players has a real and persistent tech leadership anymore. But millions and millions of users sharing their deepest thoughts and personal problems is gonna be worth infinitely more than all the average bot bullshit written on social media. That's also why Zuck is so incredibly desperate to get into the game. It's not about owning AI. It's about owning the world's thoughts and attention.

From Anthropic communication:

> If you’re an existing user, you have until September 28, 2025 to accept the updated Consumer Terms and make your decision. If you choose to accept the new policies now, they will go into effect immediately. These updates will apply only to new or resumed chats and coding sessions. After September 28, you’ll need to make your selection on the model training setting in order to continue using Claude. You can change your choice in your Privacy Settings at any time.

Doesn’t say clearly it applies to all the prompts from the past.

https://www.anthropic.com/news/updates-to-our-consumer-terms

“These updates will apply only to new or resumed chats and coding sessions.”

https://www.anthropic.com/news/updates-to-our-consumer-terms

Nobody could have predicted that someone who worked for Baidu, Google, and OpenAI would found a company like this.

I can only think they have been doing it for a while and now they are trying to be compliant with whatever certificate requires it.

It's an AI company, why wouldn't they use the most precious data they have?

AFAIK, Apple hasn’t done this yet.

If someone had told me 10 years ago that the typical HN front page in 2025 will look like this (and that #8 may be the UK), I'd never have believed it. And I worry we still have further to go before hitting bottom.

1. Anthropic reverses privacy stance, will train on Claude chats

3. Gun Maker Sig Sauer Citing National Security to Keep Documents from Public

4. Tesla said it didn't have key data in a fatal crash. Then a hacker found it

6. Meta might be secretly scanning your phone's camera roll

7. If you have a Claude account, they're going to train on your data moving forward

8. Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?

There is nothing surprising at all? It's not rocket science to understand that Anthropic is a very greedy company – just by analysing their sales funnel/UX you can tell that money is all they ever care about. Their marketing teams will go for any tricks to gain direct access to your pockets.

In the LLM space no other company is different – they are highly unprofitable – so once funding starts to run dry they will have the pressure to invent new ways for going even deeper into your pockets.

I believe it shouldn't happen. I'm not surprised. There is no web company (LLM or otherwise) I trust completely, let alone any of the major ad-funded ones, or the ones who are not yet profitable and desperately searching for ways to become so.

A lot of people hold Anthropic as the "clean and ethical" AI company. They're not power hungry, they are focused on safety. Their aesthetic is cool modern valley vibes. Well grounded and in touch. They don't have the stench of Altman or the ominous presence of the tech giants. They make claude code which is the darling LLM of pure souled silicon valley.

>Anthropic has had the most reasonable business model

Is this a joke? Anthropic burned $5.6 billion in 2024 and is expected to lose about $3 billion this year and it's reasonable business model?

This is intriguing. I've been working on gestalt measurements of LLM 'skew' and thought this sort of scenario might be possible.

Combine that workflow with homomorphic encryption and you've got a reasonable privacy moat.

They should be marked by default as non-trainable and you should have to opt each individual chat in as you see fit.

The cognitive load to remember to opt out every new chat should not rest on the user.

I imagine you could probably get feedback on chat transcripts especially if they're doing lots of A/B testing with models.

But more importantly (to me) is storing 5 years worth of other company's IP. That just seems wildly risky for all parties unless I really don't understand how Claude Code works.

If you want to be 100% sure you need to run/use a local LLM.

Also it seems that this data retention/training does not apply to the API.

I think both Anthropic and OpenAI do not train on enterprise data, so an enterprise account maybe.

Mistral doesn't seem to train on user data for the non-free models, but you can opt out on the free models.

https://help.mistral.ai/en/articles/347617-do-you-use-my-use...

Does not apply to team/enterprise/education or the API.

Tell that to my Samsung TV.

This! Any LLM provider that monitors chat/api history for ‘abuse’ towards the model is considering using user data for training.

An Effective Altruism ethos provides moral/ethical cover for trampling individual privacy and property rights. Consider their recent decision to provide services for military projects.

As others have pointed out, Claude was trained using data expressly forbidden for commercial reuse.

The only feedback Anthropic will heed is financial and the impact must be large enough to destroy their investors willingness to cover the losses. This type of financial feedback can come from three places: termination of a large fraction of their b2b contracts, software devs organizing a persistent mass migration to an open source model for software development. Neither of these are likely to happen in the next 3 months. Finally, a mass filing of data deletion requests from California and EU residents and corporations that repeats every week.

No, it's a very deliberate strategy. Companies do this every Friday

Nope, it's opt out. I'm in ireland.

So much this. I for one haven't opted out. I feel it's in our best interest to have better models. It would be ideal to be able to opt in/out per thread, but I don't expect most users to pay attention / be bothered with that.

In this aspect, it would've been great to give us an incentive – a discount, a donation on our behalf, plant a percent of a tree or just beg / ask nicely, explain what's in it for us.

Regarding privacy, our conversations are saved anyway, so if it would be a breach this wouldn't make much of a difference, would it?

At least they didn't drop the "Don't be evil" clause quietly

The perplexity search seemed pretty solid to me. What hallucinations did you see?

People who invested billions in Anthropic expect returns of tens of billions.

Too late.

I clicked "Accept" because I didn't want to deal with it later, especially given the new terms, and Claude training on new chats and resuming existing chats from September 28th,

but the "Accept" and "Not Now" are for the new terms of use.

So by toggling off and clicking "Accept", it will accept the toggled version. You can check the setting after accepting it at: https://claude.ai/settings/data-privacy-controls It's the "Help Improve Claude" button.

They aren't retroactively sharing chats unless you continue chatting in an old conversation. So your issue is addressed.

Managers: they're successfully maintaining employment, you say?

To start with, I'm sure there's something to be learned from all the times I've responded to a LLM with "Bad bot".

Putting a privacy setting under Settings->Privacy is making it "pretty hard to find"? Where else did you look first?

Maybe they are going to use an average vibe coder's chat to teach Claude to treat subpar developers differently? It could be a win-win outcome.

Not unless you go back and keep chatting in the existing chat.

Generally if you are not paying full price for something (in this case paying API rates) you are covering the additional cost with your data. This is true for pretty much all modern services.