Work · what's safe to share
Pasting work into AI
30-second gist~30s read
A short rule that holds in most workplaces: if you'd email it to a stranger outside your company, you can paste it into a public AI. If you wouldn't, don't.
The most common quiet career-damage in 2025-26 has been from people pasting confidential information into a free AI account. The data isn't always the issue — sometimes the audit trail is.
If you want more
What's almost always fine to paste
- Public-facing copy you're editing for your website.
- Sample data with names removed.
- Drafts of internal documents that don't contain customer or financial data.
- Code that's already open-source.
- Your own notes, your own writing, things you'd happily blog.
What to never paste into a public AI
- Customer data with names, emails, phone numbers, account details.
- Internal source code (especially anything with API keys or secrets).
- Pre-release financials, board papers, M&A documents.
- Anything covered by an NDA — yours or someone else's.
- Patient health information, legal advice from your lawyer, HR records.
The middle ground
If your company has an enterprise AI (Microsoft 365 Copilot, Google Workspace AI, an internal ChatGPT Enterprise, an Azure OpenAI deployment) — use that for confidential work. Enterprise AIs typically don't train on your data and the data stays inside your tenant. The "don't paste this" list shrinks dramatically when the AI is contractually inside your company's boundary.