Every private thing you've ever typed into ChatGPT trains its next model — and that's the default.

The exact clicks

1. Open ChatGPT on the web or the app, and open Settings (click your name/profile in the bottom-left on web, or the profile icon in the app).
2. Go to the 'Data Controls' section of Settings.
3. Find the toggle labeled 'Improve the model for everyone' — if it's on (the default for Free/Plus/Pro accounts), your conversations, uploaded files and the answers you receive are being used to train future models.
4. Switch that toggle off.
5. Understand what this does and doesn't do: every conversation you have AFTER turning it off stays out of training completely. It does NOT retroactively remove anything already sent before you turned it off — once a conversation entered the training pipeline, this toggle can't pull it back out.
6. (Optional, for a single sensitive conversation) Instead of relying on the toggle, start a 'Temporary Chat' (the toggle/icon near the message box, or a dedicated button depending on your app version) — it never enters your chat history and is never used for training, automatically, every time, with nothing to remember to turn off.
7. Confirm the change stuck: open a new regular chat afterward and check Settings → Data Controls again — the toggle should still read off.

What changes

• Verified live (16.9.2026) against OpenAI's own Help Center articles: 'How your data is used to improve model performance' and 'What if I want to keep my history on but disable model training?' — this is current, documented behavior, not assumed from an older version of ChatGPT.
• Default state confirmed as ON for Free/Plus/Pro accounts, and OFF by default for Temporary Chats and Business plans, per the same source.
• This is a plain-language, personal-privacy topic — a deliberate exception to this channel's usual demand-report-driven topic selection, made explicitly per the 16.9.2026 reach-first content decision (see channel/content-memory.md).

What it will not do

• Turning the toggle off is not retroactive — anything sent before you turned it off may already be part of a training run and cannot be pulled back out by this setting.
• Temporary Chat still stores the conversation on OpenAI's servers for up to 30 days for safety monitoring before permanent deletion — it skips history and training, not all server-side storage.
• This episode covers OpenAI's ChatGPT specifically; other AI tools (Claude, Gemini, etc.) have their own separate data-training settings, not covered here.