Ask HN: Privacy concerns when using AI assistants for coding?

6•Kholin•9mo ago

I've recently seen some teams claim to use third-party AI assistants like Claude or ChatGPT for coding. Don't they consider it a problem to feed their proprietary commercial code into the services of these third-party companies?

If you feed the most critical parts of your project to an AI, wouldn't that introduce security vulnerabilities? The AI would then have an in-depth understanding of your project's core architecture. Consequently, couldn't other AI users potentially gain easy access to these underlying details and breach your security defenses?

Furthermore, couldn't other users then easily copy your code without any attribution, making it seem no different from open-source software?

Comments

rvz•9mo ago

Don't forget that your env API keys are getting read and sent to Cursor, Anthropic, OpenAI and Gemini as well.

baobun•9mo ago

Especially under current US administration and geopolitical climate?

Yeah, we're not doing that.

Also moved our private git repos and CIs to self-managed.

apothegm•9mo ago

In theory, these companies all claim they don’t use data from API calls for training. Whether or not they adhere to that is… TBD, I guess.

So far I’ve decided to trust Anthropic and OpenAI with my code, but not Deepseek, for instance.

bhaney•9mo ago

> The AI would then have an in-depth understanding of your project's core architecture

God how I wish this were true

ATechGuy•9mo ago

I believe enterprises that care about privacy are using private AI from big tech (say Github copilot), others may not care so much about it.

jonplackett•9mo ago

If your code is written properly then it would be secure even if someone can see the source code (unless there’s environment keys in there that shouldn’t be exposed).

If the only security you have it that your code / site structure is secret that’s not good.

LLMs are powerful, but enterprises are deterministic by nature

Ask HN: Anyone Using a Mac Studio for Local AI/LLM?

Ask HN: Ideas for small ways to make the world a better place

Ask HN: Non AI-obsessed tech forums

Ask HN: 10 months since the Llama-4 release: what happened to Meta AI?

Ask HN: Non-profit, volunteers run org needs CRM. Is Odoo Community a good sol.?

Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2026)

AI Regex Scientist: A self-improving regex solver

Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2026)

Tell HN: Another round of Zendesk email spam

Ask HN: Is Connecting via SSH Risky?

Ask HN: Has your whole engineering team gone big into AI coding? How's it going?

Ask HN: Why LLM providers sell access instead of consulting services?

Ask HN: What is the most complicated Algorithm you came up with yourself?

Ask HN: How does ChatGPT decide which websites to recommend?

Ask HN: Is it just me or are most businesses insane?

Ask HN: Any International Job Boards for International Workers?

Ask HN: Mem0 stores memories, but doesn't learn user patterns

Ask HN: Is there anyone here who still uses slide rules?

Kernighan on Programming

Ask HN: Anyone Seeing YT ads related to chats on ChatGPT?

Ask HN: Does global decoupling from the USA signal comeback of the desktop app?

We built a serverless GPU inference platform with predictable latency

Ask HN: How Did You Validate?

Ask HN: Does a good "read it later" app exist?

Ask HN: Have you been fired because of AI?

Ask HN: Cheap laptop for Linux without GUI (for writing)

Ask HN: Anyone have a "sovereign" solution for phone calls?

Test management tools for automation heavy teams

Ask HN: OpenClaw users, what is your token spend?