Dear Customer, Fuck you.
We've updated our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Effective immediately (or whenever we decided, really), we may use your content, code, chats, interactions, telemetry, and whatever else you leave on our platform to train, improve, and develop AI models. We may also share it with third-party AI model providers. By continuing to use the service, you agree. If you don't like it, stop using the service.
A frontier AI lab showed up with a check large enough to make the question "should we sell our users' data?" feel rhetorical. Not "maybe we can anonymize and aggregate." Not "only if users opt in." Just: here is the number. The number at which the internal debate ends and the legal team starts drafting the "continued use constitutes acceptance" language. That number is the new definition of fuck-you money. It is the amount required for a company to accept the lab's terms and then turn around and tell you that if you object, you can fuck off.
This is not rare. It has become routine. Developer platforms, consumer apps, productivity tools, and social services have been quietly rewriting the same clause for a couple of years. Free and lower-tier users are often opted in by default. Paid tiers sometimes get a slightly softer default or a self-serve toggle. Enterprise gets the polished contract language that says "we won't train on your data" while the consumer side of the same company does the opposite. Opt-outs exist in many places, but they are usually account-level, non-retroactive, and full of exceptions for "safety," "feedback," and "already-trained models." Data that already went into a previous training run does not come back out.
The public licensing market gives a rough sense of the scale of the checks involved. Multi-year deals in the tens to low hundreds of millions of dollars for high-value content sources are no longer surprising. Most of the money never reaches the people who actually generated the data. It reaches the platforms that sit between the users and the labs. The ToS update is simply the mechanism that turns your ordinary use of a product into a licensable asset.
The legal form is familiar: notice plus continued use. Clickwrap for the original agreement, then passive acceptance for the expansion. Courts often uphold it when the notice is clear enough. Regulators have warned that quietly expanding prior privacy promises can cross into unfair or deceptive territory, but the updates keep coming. The practical effect is the same in almost every case. The company keeps the data rights. You keep the product, or you leave.
So the email you receive is accurate, if incomplete. We found our price. The lab found our price. You are now being informed of the transaction after the fact, with the traditional customer-service flourish: if you disagree, cancel.