vs Claude

Claude is good. Here’s the gap it can’t close.

Anthropic gets privacy more seriously than most.

And Claude still runs on someone else’s servers.

Credit where it's due

Claude is, on most reasonable measures, the most privacy-forward of the major frontier AI products. Anthropic doesn’t train on paid customer prompts by default. Zero data retention is available on request for API customers. The published policies are unusually clear, and the company has been consistent about not making privacy a rolling negotiation.

We use Claude. So do many of our users. Most of this page is not an argument against Claude.

The three things contractual privacy can't change

Even with the best-case Anthropic terms, three things remain true:
  • The document still leaves your machine. It travels to Anthropic’s infrastructure (AWS and GCP regions), gets processed there, and the response comes back. “Not used for training” doesn’t mean “never read by the processor.” Abuse review, safety investigations, and support escalations all involve people with access.
  • A contract binds the parties, not the courts. Anthropic can promise not to retain your conversations. A US federal judge can override that promise with a preservation order. In May 2025 OpenAI was ordered to retain “deleted” ChatGPT messages over user objection. Anthropic isn’t the subject of that case, but the legal mechanism that produced it isn’t vendor-specific.
  • The vendor can revoke access. In September 2025 Anthropic updated its terms to restrict services from entities more than 50% owned by companies headquartered in unsupported regions, and Hong Kong, Macau, and mainland China are not on Anthropic’s supported-countries list. By April 2026 Goldman Sachs had cut its Hong Kong bankers off from Claude entirely after a stricter reading of its Anthropic contract. A tool you depend on can stop working overnight, for reasons that have nothing to do with your work.

Architectural privacy, where the document never leaves the device, is the only kind a court, a regulator, or a sudden vendor policy change can’t override.

How the two compare on the things that matter

  • Where the document goes. Claude: to Anthropic’s infrastructure. Muet: nowhere. It stays on your Mac.
  • Training default. Claude: not used for training on paid tiers, by contract. Muet: there is no training pipeline because there is no vendor-side data.
  • Retention. Claude: 30 days by default for most paid tiers, less under ZDR. Muet: none, because we have no servers that touch your work.
  • Discoverable in litigation. Claude: yes, in principle. Anthropic can be subpoenaed. Muet: there is nothing to discover.
  • Sub-processors. Claude: AWS, GCP, and others, listed in Anthropic’s DPA. Muet: none involved in the work itself.
  • DPA required for GDPR work. Claude: yes, Anthropic’s standard DPA. Muet: not required, because Muet isn’t a processor.
  • Works offline. Claude: no. Muet: yes, after activation and model download.
  • HIPAA BAA. Claude: on Enterprise (and on Claude via Amazon Bedrock under AWS’s BAA). Muet: BAA question doesn’t arise, because we never receive PHI.
  • Price. Claude Pro: $20/mo. Claude Team: $20–$25/seat/mo (Standard), $100–$125 (Premium). Muet: $390/year per device, one annual invoice.

Where Claude is the right tool

For most work, Claude is excellent and we’d use it before Muet. Brainstorming, drafting that isn’t about a real client, writing public-facing content, code, research where the inputs are public, anything where the documents you’re feeding in aren’t under a confidentiality duty, Claude is faster, has stronger general reasoning, and costs less per hour of use.

The breadth of model options, the long context window, the ecosystem of tools and integrations, and Anthropic’s privacy posture make Claude a sensible default for the eighty percent of professional work that’s fine to send to a vendor.

Where Muet fits alongside

For the twenty percent where the contract isn’t the thing you’re relying on. A privileged communication, a target-company data room, a patient record, an unblinded trial, an internal investigation, a pre-patent disclosure, a sealed exhibit, a financial document with real names. The work where you don’t want an audit trail at the vendor at all. Not because Anthropic is untrustworthy, but because “at the vendor” is the part you can’t control.

Most of our paying users run both. Claude for the broad work, Muet on the laptop for the documents that have to stay where they are. The two don’t conflict.

By Claude tier

  • Claude Free. Conversations may be reviewed for safety. Don’t use it for anything confidential. Muet covers the privileged work.
  • Claude Pro ($20/mo). No training by default, 30-day retention. Fine for most personal professional work. Muet still fills the “don’t want it anywhere” cases.
  • Claude Team ($20–$25/seat/mo Standard, $100–$125 Premium). Centralised admin, more usage, same underlying privacy posture as Pro. Premium adds capacity, not a different privacy regime. Muet still fits for confidential matters not appropriate for the shared workspace.
  • Claude Enterprise. SSO, audit logs, BAAs available, custom data-residency. The strongest enterprise terms in the category. Muet still fits on partner and associate laptops for work outside the firm’s shared deployment.

Try it

Pricing

$390per Mac, per year

30-day money-back guarantee. Apple Silicon (M1 or newer), macOS 14 or newer. One licence per device, easy to expense.

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