Simon Willison’s Weblog

Gemini API Additional Terms of Service. I've been trying to figure out what Google's policy is on using data submitted to their Google Gemini LLM for further training. It turns out it's clearly spelled out in their terms of service, but it differs for the paid v.s. free tiers.

The paid APIs do not train on your inputs:

When you're using Paid Services, Google doesn't use your prompts (including associated system instructions, cached content, and files such as images, videos, or documents) or responses to improve our products [...] This data may be stored transiently or cached in any country in which Google or its agents maintain facilities.

The Gemini API free tier does:

The terms in this section apply solely to your use of Unpaid Services. [...] Google uses this data, consistent with our Privacy Policy, to provide, improve, and develop Google products and services and machine learning technologies, including Google’s enterprise features, products, and services. To help with quality and improve our products, human reviewers may read, annotate, and process your API input and output.

But watch out! It looks like the AI Studio tool, since it's offered for free (even if you have a paid account setup) is treated as "free" for the purposes of these terms. There's also an interesting note about the EU:

The terms in this "Paid Services" section apply solely to your use of paid Services ("Paid Services"), as opposed to any Services that are offered free of charge like direct interactions with Google AI Studio or unpaid quota in Gemini API ("Unpaid Services"). [...] If you're in the European Economic Area, Switzerland, or the United Kingdom, the terms applicable to Paid Services apply to all Services including AI Studio even though it's offered free of charge.

Confusingly, the following paragraph about data used to fine-tune your own custom models appears in that same "Data Use for Unpaid Services" section:

Google only uses content that you import or upload to our model tuning feature for that express purpose. Tuning content may be retained in connection with your tuned models for purposes of re-tuning when supported models change. When you delete a tuned model, the related tuning content is also deleted.

It turns out their tuning service is "free of charge" on both pay-as-you-go and free plans according to the Gemini pricing page, though you still pay for input/output tokens at inference time (on the paid tier - it looks like the free tier remains free even for those fine-tuned models).