What Happens to the Data You Connect

You're about to paste a contract into Cowork to get it summarized. Your cursor is in the box. The text is on your clipboard. And you stop.

Where does this go? Is it stored? Does a person read it? Does it end up training some future model a competitor will one day query? You don't actually know, so you close the tab and summarize the contract yourself, badly, over the next forty minutes.

That hesitation is the right instinct pointed at the wrong target. You're not being paranoid. You've just never looked up the actual answer, so every decision about confidential work is a guess.

The answer is knowable, and mostly reassuring. Let's make it concrete.

#What "connect" and "paste" actually do

Both pasting text and using a connector send data to Anthropic's servers to generate a response. That's not a loophole: it's how the product works. There is no version that reads your contract without the contract leaving your machine.