Overview
When you ask Claude or ChatGPT to compare two versions of a privileged document, two different systems handle it, and they handle it differently. This article says what each one sees and what is kept, so you can decide what to attach.
What the assistant sees
The assistant receives the files you attach to the conversation. How it stores them, and whether it uses them for anything else, is governed by that provider's own terms, not by Version Story. Connecting Version Story does not change what Claude or ChatGPT does with an attachment.
What Version Story sees
With Version Story connected, the assistant hands the two versions to Version Story and asks for a redline. From there:
- No model reads your documents. The redline is computed by Version Story's rules-based comparison engine, written in Rust. The assistant does not write the comparison, and no language model is involved in producing it. The same two versions always give the same redline.
- Nothing is used for training. Your documents are never used to train or improve any model, ours or anyone else's.
- No person reads them. There is no human review step, no contractors, and no crowd workers.
- AI is off by default. Nothing goes through a model unless your organization asks us to turn on an AI feature, such as AI conversion of scanned PDFs or Analytics reports.
The redline comes back to the conversation as a file: a PDF, or a Word document with tracked changes.
What is kept
Every comparison you run from an assistant is saved to a project in your Version Story account, next to the versions, where it stays until you delete it. Organization admins can set automatic deletion for inactive projects.
Firms that want nothing kept at all use the REST API with zero-day retention turned on: the documents, the redline, and every rendering are permanently deleted within an hour of the comparison finishing, or the moment the download is acknowledged. The Data handling page has the details.
Keeping documents out of the assistant entirely
If your firm's position is that privileged documents should not pass through a third-party assistant at all, the answer is your own software calling the Version Story API directly: your system sends the two versions to Version Story and gets the redline back, with no assistant in between. That is how firms building their own client portals use it. See the REST API.