What happens to the document you paste in
Larger context windows invite bigger pastes. Before that becomes a habit, it is worth knowing exactly where those documents go.
Now that an entire manual fits in one request, people will paste entire manuals. Some of those will be documents that should not leave the building. This is a good moment for a five-minute clarification, before the habit forms.
Where it goes, in plain terms
Whatever you paste is transmitted to the provider, processed on their infrastructure in whichever region your contract specifies, and — under a business agreement — not used to train their models. It is typically retained for a short period for abuse monitoring and then deleted.
That is the business case. Under consumer terms the training question can be different, which is the 20 August setting and the reason a paid business tier matters for anything touching company data.
The part that changes with a bigger window
Not the rules, the volume. Pasting a paragraph and pasting a four-hundred-page contract are the same action under the same terms, but they are not the same exposure if something goes wrong, and they are not the same thing to explain to a customer afterwards.
The useful discipline is to ask, before a large paste: would I email this document to this supplier? If the answer is yes, paste it. If you would hesitate, that hesitation is the correct instinct and does not go away because the technical route is different.
Three document types to name explicitly
Anything containing individual salaries. Anything under a client confidentiality clause that forbids third-party processing — the 26 September contract question, now pointing the other way. And anything you hold on behalf of someone else, such as a client’s own customer data.
For those three, the on-device option from December is the answer if you genuinely need machine help with them, and doing it by hand is the answer if you do not.
What to actually do this week
Add one line to the paragraph from 11 August: whole documents follow the same rule as their contents.
People understand that a salary list is confidential. It is less obvious that a manual containing three salary figures in an annex is too, and a bigger context window makes exactly that mistake easier to make.