Is ChatGPT Safe for Inventors & Innovators?
We live in an era of instant answers. With the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, it has never been easier to brainstorm, draft emails, or research market trends. However, this convenience brings new risks for inventors.
Recently, our Innovation Coaches have raised a serious concern: they are seeing more and more clients inputting highly confidential data into public AI tools. The question on everyone's mind is simple: Is this safe?
To get a definitive answer, we decided to bypass the rumours and go straight to the experts. We consulted the AI Engineer at our sister company, Logic Lab, to understand exactly what happens to your data when you hit "send." We asked them: How safe is it for an inventor to share their idea with an LLM, and if they do, how should they do so safely?
The verdict? It is a powerful tool, but it is not a safe deposit box.
Here is the technical reality of what happens to your idea inside the chat box.
1. The "Public Disclosure" Risk
In the world of patents and design rights, novelty is crucial. To patent an invention in the UK or Europe, it must not have been made available to the public before you file your application. That includes written, oral and online disclosures. Essentially, it covers anything non-confidential that a member of the public could access.
Now consider how many AI tools work in practice. Consumer versions of chatbots often log your prompts and store them on servers controlled by the provider. Those logs may be visible to employees for debugging, safety checks or quality reviews. In many cases, the provider's terms of use allow your prompts to be used to improve or train future models unless you actively opt out or pay for a business tier.
That means you are not just talking to a robot in a box. You are transmitting information to a third-party service over the internet, where it may be stored, processed and reviewed outside your control.
From a strict legal point of view, lawyers still debate whether this always counts as a public disclosure that destroys novelty. It may depend on what the contract says, who can realistically access the data and whether there is an enforceable duty of confidence.
From a risk management point of view, however, most IP professionals will give you simple advice. If you care about patent protection, do not treat consumer AI chatbots as confidential. If you would not email your full invention dossier to a random cloud provider with no NDA, you probably should not paste it into a public chatbot either.
There is also a data protection angle. In many cases, you are sending both commercially sensitive information and personal data to a provider that may be outside the UK or EEA. Under UK GDPR, you still have responsibilities as a controller. That is another reason to think carefully about what you paste into an AI tool
2. Your Idea Could Train Future Models
There is a second risk associated with the training data.
Many AI providers improve their systems by using real user interactions as training material. Some consumer tiers of chatbots use your chats to improve models by default unless you opt out. Conversely, business and enterprise products are often configured so that customer content is not used for training.
Imagine you have invented a revolutionary coffee press. You describe the unique valve mechanism in detail to an AI to improve your design. That description could be stored in the provider's training corpus. Future versions of the model might learn the underlying idea. Months later, another user asks how to design a better coffee press with smoother extraction, and the AI generates something very close to your mechanism.
The AI does not remember you personally or deliberately leak your document, but the underlying concept has been absorbed into the system. You have effectively gifted your novel mechanism to the model, and by extension, to anyone who can get the model to reproduce something similar.