Mistral's Le Chat trains on user data by default; HN disputes framing
A Mistral help-center page confirming default training on non-enterprise input sparks an HN debate over whether the headline is misleading and whether opt-out controls actually work.
What to know
- Mistral's help center states that on non-enterprise tiers, user input/output on Le Chat (Vibe) and by default on Mistral Studio/API may be used for training, with opt-out available; enterprise defaults to opted-out.
- HN commenters dispute whether the submission's title accurately represents the source page, which frames the practice as opt-outable rather than mandatory.
- Users disagree over whether a centralized, organization-wide opt-out toggle still functions after Mistral reportedly changed Team-tier defaults.
- The disclosure is being compared to Anthropic's Claude, where paid tiers from $18/month disable training by default, fueling broader skepticism about Mistral's data practices.
The dispute Whether Mistral actually removed a working organization-wide opt-out toggle (as teekert claims) or whether it still functions as described by throwaway89201. · positions read across 233 posts and comments
Mistral's training defaults are a bait-and-switch that erodes trust in its EU-privacy positioning.
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“at the same time seemed to have lost the ability to centrally disable training on prompts for your entire organization.”
teekert · Hacker News
The HN title misrepresents the actual policy; Mistral's page emphasizes user control and opt-out rights.
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“This is a hugely misleading editorialised title.”
saaaaaam · Hacker News
The real defaults are confusing enough that a plain tier-by-tier breakdown is needed, and enforcement/GDPR compliance is unverifiable.
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“Service: Vibe Plan: Non-Enterprise Default: Opted in Opt-out possible? Yes”
matthieu_bl · Hacker News
“They wouldn't dare train on language inputs from the wild, but they will happily strip out any code snippets you're providing and sell/train on that à la GitHub/Copilot. File uploads too”
LoveMistral, HN commenter · Hacker News · Sep 1
Mistral AI French AI company operating Le Chat/Vibe and Mistral Studioteekert HN submitter and commenterthrowaway89201 HN commentersaaaaaam HN commentermatthieu_bl HN commenter
The record 2 articles and posts · last 30 days
What people are saying 24 voices from 1 site · best of 233 · verbatim
- Does entering PII into a prompt that Mistral retains for training violate GDPR even if users are told not to submit PII?
- How would a user verify that Mistral actually honors an opt-out toggle once set?
- Sep 4
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Vote for people who want to restore the 1950s federal tax rates that we already had in the 1950s. I find so sad that people ignore history and act like solutions don't already exist.The 90% tax bracket in the 1950s capped CEO and investor yearly income to the 2026 equivalent of 5mil a year. Use that imaginative brain that likes to speculate…
- Sep 3
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> They said "opt in to training on prompts by default," which is coherent English and perfectly fine"Opt in" and "by default" are contradictory phrases. They mean literally the opposite of each other. The only reason it's coherent is that most native speakers will elect to believe "by default" was used correctly because it's the easier to use…
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This only makes sense if your model is 'the labs are just breaking the rules all the time' as opposed to 'the labs have a legal theory of defense for the one aspect of the business which is legally questionable'. The question of whether doing something their terms of service explicitly say they will not do opens them up to civil liability is a…
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>You have to be rather naive if you don't think these companies don't simply train on your prompts with or without your consent. They literally scrape everything - legal or not - and claim its fair use to train on, including straight piracyHave been having a think about this statement. I agree in intent, some of them are probably breaking the…
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I think there is a simple, unambiguous way to describe this, which is to use the passive voice or an explicit subject with the past tense to clarify that you didn't do the opting in.Saying "we were disappointed to be opted in to training by default" clarifies the point you're trying to make, which is that the toggle (whatever it may be called) was…
- Sep 2
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The credit reporting agencies lost the data of normal people, they didn’t lose their customers proprietary internal data. The credit agencies didn’t loose or misplace their customers data, so obviously their customers don’t really care that much, and the credit agencies weren’t sued into oblivion.But I can guarantee you that if a companies…
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No it wouldn't.It wasn't "catastrophic" for the largest of the 3 US credit reporting agencies when their entire dataset was breached. The company is 100% IP and the only value they have was completely copied. Their largest value is to verify identities by the things Americans know (KDB) and after that "single factor of identity" was 100%…
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It would be catastrophic if they violated confidentiality blatantly, but that doesn't exclude learning of any description. For example, an ordinary human being can't fork a subagent for a particular client and wipe it afterwards. Humans can't stop themselves learning, so confidentiality can't ban all learning.Instead, confidentiality includes not…
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Grok has possibly the worst ToS of any of the AI providers. They are probably different in the EU, but:> In choosing to submit, create, generate, record, post, or display Inputs on or through the Service, you grant an irrevocable, perpetual, transferable, sublicensable, royalty-free, and worldwide right to SpaceXAI to use, copy, store, modify…
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> being disappointed that the Pro tier was opt-in to training on prompts by default"Opt-in" means that the default is non-participation, for example, not training on your prompts. Is it possible that you intended to say "opt-out", which means that the default is participation? That's what the context seems to suggest.See, for example…
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Submitted title was "Mistral now trains on user input by default, except on enterprise tier". THat's good information (if true) but best suited to a comment in the thread rather than the title (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).We've changed it to the article title now per
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Since the whole idea of ‘opt in’ is choosing to do something, the only reasonable interpretation of ‘opt in by default’ is that the default state requires you to make the choice yourself. However I try to bend my brain, sing the term ‘opt in’ for the exact opposite makes no sense whatsoever.Note that I’m not using English grammar as my argument…
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I pay for a subscription to Duck.ai mainly because I don't want to be constantly fighting my vendor to protect my privacy.Microsoft already did a rug pull on me and opted me in to training months after I signed up with Github Copilot. It exhausting and ultimately futile to monitor these companies.It's not guaranteed that Duck.ai will continue to…
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I'd be interested in some legal/GDPR takes on PII handling in prompts. If someone enters PII into a prompt, and Mistral retains it for training, is it sufficient for them to say "don't enter PII into prompts?"Of course with Claude and so on this bothers me too, but it doesn't seem like there's any real recourse under US law. But I would hope that…
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When I started my search for an AI "partner" the Mistral TEAM plan had "use my prompts for training" turned off by default, as per their docs in multiple places. I could have sworn I saw a organization switch in my dashboard for this setting org wide, but am not sure.I start the subscription, users report it is "on" by default, I ask support…
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The toggles I seeat https://admin.mistral.ai/vibe/privacy:Allow public sharing of chats contentAllow user feedback on model responsesChat Retention PolicyAt https://admin.mistral.ai/plateforme/privacy I seeAllow the use of your API calls to train Mistral’s AI models.Enable Labs modelsSo indeed, no "Allow the use of your interactions with Vibe to…
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> Most commenters here clutching their pearls as if Claude and Gemini Pro didn't do it already.That's not the point though. The problem is that in the minds of lots of people including here on HN or otherwise, a service based in the EU is de-facto "more" respectful of digital privacy.You can read the comments on threads related to the EU tech…
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You must have not been keeping up with the times :)Their big play this year was to write a "whitepaper" on the future state of EU economy, which is something that they'd like to hand of to EU leaders and part of that proposal was some kind of mandatory 10% sovereign AI spend, or some other nonsense like that.They are, at least, trying to make big…
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"No model training on your content by default" [0]It's not the default on any Team plans and didn't used to be at Mistral (until last week or so). The team plan has a central admin role and page, and "seats".And if it was the default, then I'd still expect a big button to turn it off for all seats, and not have to ask all user separately. But this…
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FWIW I don’t find what you wrote confusing, but I do think it is following a sort of… bad convention that some companies have been pushing.Opt-in and opt-out describe the nature of the choice that you make. “Opt” means to choose (apparently it is a French word we stole). Opt-in means you have to proactively choose to be in. Opt-out means you have…
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as another non-native speaker, i think that while the person you're answering to didn't use the default way of expressing this in the english-speaking world, i did understand what they meant, i think they do know what opting means and i think the reasoning is this: when they say data collection is "opt in" by default they mean that by choosing to…
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I'm really hoping Mistral will succeed with their open models, so I'm a bit biased, but I don't have any affiliation. This submit is a bit of well-meaning but confused scaremongering however.Mistral has had, and continues to have, a toggle in the admin settings that permanently disables training on your data. The option has not been removed, and…
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> and at the same time seemed to have lost the ability to centrally disable training on prompts for your entire organizationThere is a toggle on https://admin.mistral.ai that allows you to disable training for both Vibe and Console/API for your entire organisation. And I'm not on the enterprise plan. I've disabled training the first time I created…
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Context: After careful research our organization preferred a European partner with good central privacy controls. We landed on Mistral, after being disappointed that the Pro tier was opt-in to training on prompts by default we switched up to the Team tier which provides an organization dashboard with some relevant settings. As we did that Mistral…