Is ChatGPT confidential?
No — not in the sense that matters to you. When you paste or upload a client document, that document leaves your computer and is processed on someone else's. You can turn off model training, and you should. But the training setting is not the question. The question is whether the file left, and it did.
That distinction is the whole thing, and it is the part the settings page will not tell you. Most people arrive at this question worried about the AI "learning" from their material. Turning training off is a real control and it addresses a real concern. What it does not do is undo the disclosure. The document was transmitted to a third party, held on their infrastructure, and retained for some period under their policy rather than yours. If your obligation is that the material stays with you, the toggle does not restore it — it only limits what happens next.
The people who feel this most sharply are the ones who are personally accountable rather than institutionally covered. A large firm papers this over with a procurement review, a data-processing agreement and someone whose job is to sign it. A solo practice, a private clinic, an independent consultant under an NDA — there is nobody to absorb it. The person the client calls is you.
What we are not going to tell you
We are not going to tell you whether this breaches a specific duty. Whether a given disclosure implicates privilege, a professional-conduct rule, a health-privacy statute or the terms of an NDA depends on your jurisdiction, your regulator and the agreement you signed. That is a question for your bar association, your board or your own counsel, and anyone selling you software who answers it confidently is telling you something they cannot know.
What we can tell you is the mechanical fact, because it is checkable: with a cloud assistant, the file goes out. With SealedBrief, it does not — and you do not have to take that on faith either.
The alternative, described plainly
SealedBrief is a desktop application that answers questions across your own documents using a model that runs on your machine. You point it at a folder — case files, session notes, an engagement archive — and ask questions across the whole set. Answers cite the passages they came from, so you can click back to the page. When it cannot ground an answer in your documents, it says so instead of inventing a citation.
The reason nothing is uploaded is structural rather than promised. The application runs as two separate operating-system processes. The one that reads your documents, runs the model and holds the index has no network access at all. The other draws the interface and makes exactly two kinds of call — checking your licence and checking for updates — and neither carries your documents or your questions.
You can confirm that yourself in about five minutes. Start a packet capture, index a folder, ask a few questions, and watch what the document process does on the wire: nothing. The exact commands for macOS and Linux are on the verify-it-yourself page, and your IT person can reproduce it on demand. That is the difference between a vendor's assurance and something you checked.
What it costs you to switch
Being honest about the trade, because you will find these out anyway. It runs on macOS (Apple Silicon) and Linux — Windows is not available yet and is on a waitlist. The application and its models are a single download of roughly 15 GB, so the first install is an evening, not a minute; after that it works with no internet at all. A model running on your own hardware is not the frontier model you are used to, and on a thin CPU-only laptop an answer takes tens of seconds. Document text and metadata are encrypted at rest; the embedding vectors are not, because the search needs them in the clear, and we would rather you heard that from us.
The free 14-day trial needs no account and no card, and starting it makes no network call. If you want the mechanism first, read how to verify the no-egress claim; if you want the reasoning at length, there is a longer piece on working with confidential documents without uploading them.