this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2026
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I just pulled up the ChatGPT terms of use and there is no language covering use of trade secrets, so there is no contract covering trade secrets here. So what I originally said (and what you said in your “Without a contract” paragraph) is correct.
Who's talking about ChatGPT or OpenAI?
I just pulled up the Anthropic commercial API terms, since that's the situation covered by the original article (big corporation using Anthropic's paid API):
Ok, so it's a contract that purports to prohibit pretty much this kind of model weight extraction, and I'm saying that Anthropic probably considers the model weights to be trade secrets.
Are you under the impression that trade secret protection only happens when the contract says the words "trade secret"?
Or, analogously, consider customer lists. Having a contract that says "don't copy my customer lists even if I sometimes disclose a single customer at a time when we partner together on projects" is probably enough to adequately maintain trade secret protection over those customer lists, even if individual customers are sometimes disclosed under a contract.
I'm just stating what I believe the law is, not what it should be, or even claiming that what the law is today is good. I'm just saying everyone should be aware that the law is quite protective of big corporations and their proprietary secrets. I still think this qualifies as a trade secret that they've protected with their own contracts.