Public AI Engines Don’t Sign NDAs – But Your Vendor Should

Why Confidentiality, Security, and Accountability Still Matter in an AI-Driven World

A word of warning: while we’re all excited about the possibilities of artificial intelligence, not all free AI translation engines are created equal. If your organization must adhere to confidentiality and privacy requirements (for patient safety, regulatory compliance, intellectual property, or other business-critical reasons), then you must not use translation tools available to the general public.

Public translation tools don’t sign NDAs (nondisclosure agreements)

• They don’t guarantee that your data will be treated according to contractual confidentiality terms
• They don’t protect your data’s integrity
• They don’t promise your data will be stored within your country’s legal jurisdiction
• They don’t offer any recourse if the information is misused or otherwise exposed

In short: they don’t protect your data.

The Invisible Risk of “Free” AI Translation Tools

One of the promises of AI translation engines is that they are free. This may be true for the end user. But there is a hidden cost in trading privacy and confidentiality for something that’s free.

AI systems “learn” by reprocessing raw text and the outputs of previous versions of themselves. When you paste text into a public AI engine such as ChatGPT, Google Translate, or the free web interface from DeepL, the information leaves your organization’s servers. Even if the service provider states that “the data isn’t stored,” internal logs will still capture interactions and text data to improve future versions of the model, to generate analytics about usage and performance, and for bug tracking.

Sensitive source material (clinical protocols, IFUs, investigator brochures, adverse event reports, or patient-identifiable information) may end up on external servers beyond your control. Uploaded material is also subject to the provider’s data-usage policies, not terms negotiated between your organization and its service providers.

What this means, in practice, is that once you paste information into a public AI translation tool, it may:

• Be stored outside your country of operation’s legal jurisdiction (risking GDPR or HIPAA exposure)
• Be retained and reprocessed for model improvement
• Be visible to developers and other third-party contractors
• Appear, directly or indirectly, in the output of future model versions to other users

If this set of outcomes sounds incompatible with your company’s obligations to protect and manage the privacy of this information, that’s because it is.

The Regulatory Implications: ISO, GDPR, HIPAA, and Beyond

The international quality, data integrity, and patient privacy frameworks in which the life-sciences industry operates all assume that data can be traced, controlled, and audited. That’s not possible with a public AI system, which has no legal obligation to its users.

ISO 17100 & 9001: Quality management requires documented, repeatable processes, data-protection policies, and vendor-accountability

ISO 27001: Information-security management (requirements to protect client data)

GDPR: Explicit consent and purpose limitation for processing of personal data

HIPAA: Strict controls around protected health information (PHI)

Public AI platforms don’t have certification to any of these frameworks. Security statements published by AI providers rarely extend contractual liability to the end user. That is, there is no audit trail, no quality certification, and no legal accountability.

Compare that to a professional-language-services provider that signs NDAs, master-service agreements, and uses data-security protocols certified to ISO 27001, where every linguist, reviewer, and project manager has signed legal documents obligating them to protect confidentiality.

NDAs: The Cornerstone of Trust in Life-Science Translation

A nondisclosure agreement is a legally binding contract between a service provider and its clients about how data is treated, stored, and destroyed. In highly regulated industries, NDAs are how companies protect:

• Confidentiality (proprietary method or molecule names, clinical data, etc.)
• Liability for loss or unauthorized disclosure of data
• Traceability (signed documentation, controlled access to sensitive information)
• Peace of mind knowing your vendor has legal responsibility for protecting your data

By using a public AI tool to upload documents, you don’t get these protections. You are, effectively, passing data to an unknown party with no responsibility for its use. Would your company ever share a draft submission with a unvetted third party? If not, then don’t share it with an AI model that does precisely that, but faster and on a global scale.

The Illusion of Anonymity

“I know we’re not supposed to input identifiable data, but we don’t!” is a common refrain among users of online AI translation engines. Translation, in particular, often has identifiers woven throughout the text (protocol numbers, study-site names, or internal reference codes). Even if no patient data is input, the AI system still processes these elements, which could be enough to link anonymized clinical data back to confidential internal projects. This possibility increases once the uploaded content is exposed to additional external data sources.

AI models have no internal concept of what “sensitive” data means. Once you’ve put it into the system, the AI processes every token in the source material, including molecule names, patient numbers, or sensitive project names. Removing any identifiable information (anonymizing text) before translation may sound like the safer option. But even that process is, in itself, a data-handling procedure that might breach data-integrity policies. It’s a compliance and risk nightmare under the guise of innovation.

Why Language Scientific Takes a Different Approach

Language Scientific’s AI-optimized translation model is the result of many years of R&D, built by engineers and linguists specifically for the life-sciences sector. Behind the scenes, our AI technologies are owned, developed, and licensed by our in-house IT department. The human-in-the-loop process is managed by our team of language experts and scientists through our ASKnetwork™ in ISO 9001, 17100, and 27001-certified translation environments. This includes:

• Secure, encrypted file transfer and storage
• Strict NDAs for all linguists, engineers, and technical reviewers
• Controlled access and full audit trails
• Human validation of AI outputs to ensure accuracy and compliance with regulatory standards
• 99.7% on-time delivery across thousands of projects and global teams

You get the best of both worlds: speed and innovation backed by the confidentiality, quality, and traceability demanded by regulators worldwide.

Real-World Consequences of Ignoring the NDA Principle

A biotech client uploaded a section of a pre-clinical study report into a web-based translation tool, hoping to “speed things up.” Months later, the same phrases showed up verbatim in another dataset found in the public domain. While there was no smoking gun to definitively link the exposure to the original organization, the data risk was high enough to trigger an internal data-breach investigation and remediation.

The moral of this story: once information leaves your secure servers, you no longer control what happens to it. For life-science organizations, the price of convenience can be high indeed: anywhere from regulatory warning letters to damaged reputations, patient safety issues, and leaked competitive IP. Public AI engines simply don’t (and can’t) absorb that risk. The liability falls to you.

Key Takeaway: Control Your Data, or Someone Else Will!

Artificial intelligence is making translation better, faster, and more accessible than ever before. It can also make it less compliant, less confidential, and less secure.

NDAs are the simplest, most effective way to establish accountability between you and your vendor. They ensure the people working with your data are legally responsible for how they handle it, something no public AI model can offer.

At Language Scientific, we believe there is no trade-off between innovation and security. Our AI-optimized workflows mean life-science organizations can benefit from the speed and accuracy of AI translation in a controlled, certified, and NDA-protected environment.

After all, while AI may be public, your data should never be.

Check out Language Scientific for all your AI translation needs.

Or Contact Us to learn more.