Does pasting my invention into ChatGPT or Claude count as public disclosure?

Whether it legally counts as a public disclosure has not been tested in court, but most patent attorneys treat pasting an unfiled invention into a consumer chatbot as a risk you should not take. A public disclosure is a disclosure to anyone not bound by a duty of confidentiality, and the standard consumer terms of ChatGPT and Claude do not create such a duty towards you. On ChatGPT Free, Plus and Pro, conversations are used to train OpenAI's models by default unless you switch off Improve the model for everyone in Data Controls. On Claude Free, Pro and Max, chats are used for training when the Help improve Claude setting is on; Anthropic's policy states that raw content read through connectors and MCP servers is excluded, but anything you type or paste into the chat is not.

The consequences differ by region. Europe and most of the world apply absolute novelty under Article 54 EPC, so a disclosure that counts as public before your filing date destroys novelty, with no grace period. The US gives inventors a one-year grace period for their own disclosures under 35 U.S.C. 102(b)(1). A separate risk is trade secret status, which depends on taking reasonable steps to keep the information confidential. Safer options: use business tiers that do not train on your data by default (ChatGPT Team and Enterprise, Claude for Work and Enterprise, or the APIs), use a Temporary Chat in ChatGPT or an Incognito chat in Claude, keep the specifics vague until you have filed, or file a priority application first and then work openly. Lightbringer's own advice on its connector page is the same: check your assistant's data controls before connecting sensitive, pre-filing invention details.