What happened
- Mistral updated its help center and technical documentation to make explicit that free-tier Vibe conversations can be used to train its models, unless the account turns that option off in the admin panel.
- Vibe’s Pro, Team and Enterprise tiers, as well as Mistral Studio and paid API traffic, are excluded from training by default.
- The Vibe and API controls are independent. Turning off one doesn’t cover the other, as the help center itself notes.
- Documents attached or uploaded within Vibe count as input data. They fall under the same regime as the text written in the conversation.
Why it matters
- The default setting is the real policy, not the one the marketing site declares. A team that tried the free version to draft a proposal has already handed over that material, without having agreed to anything different from what it agreed to when signing up.
- The delicate point is attachments. A proposal, a contract or a spreadsheet someone uploads “just to summarize” falls under the same rule as the prompt.
- Responsibility for third parties’ personal data contained in those files remains with whoever uploaded them, not with the model provider. It’s the same logic at work when an agent reads someone else’s document on your behalf. For a small business handling other people’s accounts, that distinction determines who is liable if something goes wrong.
The number
2 separate switches. Turning off training in Vibe doesn’t turn it off for the API, or vice versa. You have to do it twice, in different places.
Context
The correction circulated on Hacker News, where several developers pointed out that the new text contradicts the previous wording. Another page of Mistral’s documentation still states that data sent through the API isn’t used for training, without distinguishing the free tier from the paid one. Both statements coexist on the same site today, and neither refers to the other. In the week Brussels required another provider to audit how it works on the inside, documentation was still the only place to look.
What’s next
- Mistral announced no change in policy, only in wording. No timelines announced.
- The option is turned off in the admin panel, in the Vibe section, under Privacy, by unchecking the permission to use interactions for training.
- On iOS and Android the same control lives in the app settings.
Bottom line
None of these conditions changed this week. What changed is that they’re now written where someone might look for them, and the data that went in before the correction went in all the same.
This note describes terms of service published by a provider and does not constitute legal advice.
