How to Opt Out of AWS AI Training and Protect Your Data

AWS AI Opt-Out: Why It’s Harder Than It Should Be and How to Do It

AWS has built its reputation on customer trust and data privacy, yet when it comes to AI training opt-out, the process is far more convoluted than it should be. Unlike some competitors, AWS doesn’t indiscriminately train its AI models on all your data, but it does analyze your usage of specific AWS AI services to improve its models. And while AWS provides an opt-out mechanism, it’s buried deep in AWS Organizations policies and requires multiple steps that seem intentionally discouraging.

Which AWS Services Are Training AI on Your Usage?

AWS does not train its AI on your S3 data or EC2 workloads. However, it does collect insights from how customers interact with Amazon CodeWhisperer, Amazon Rekognition, Amazon Transcribe, Amazon Polly, and other AI-powered services. This training helps AWS improve its AI products, but it also raises concerns about data sovereignty and compliance, especially since AWS explicitly states that some of this training data may be processed outside of your chosen AWS region.

AWS’s AI training policy is buried within the AWS Service Terms and is never explicitly presented when you start using these services. If you don’t manually opt out, your organization is passively opted in by default.

How to Opt Out of AWS AI Training

If AWS were truly “customer-obsessed”, opting out would be as simple as flipping a toggle in the AWS Console. Instead, AWS requires you to:

1. Enable AI services opt-out policies in AWS Organizations.
2. Manually create an AI opt-out policy in JSON format.
3. Attach the policy to your organization’s root OU using AWS Organizations.
4. Validate that the policy is correctly applied—which AWS doesn’t provide an easy way to confirm.

Step-by-Step: Opting Out of AWS AI Training

Method 1: Using the AWS Console

1. Sign in to the AWS Organizations Console as an admin.
2. Navigate to AI services opt-out policies.
3. Click Opt out from all services and confirm.

Method 2: Using AWS CLI or SDKs (Recommended for Larger Organizations)

If you want to enforce this org-wide using Infrastructure as Code, you’ll need to define an AI services opt-out policy in JSON and attach it to your organization’s root OU:

{
    "services": {
        "@@operators_allowed_for_child_policies": ["@@none"],
        "default": {
            "@@operators_allowed_for_child_policies": ["@@none"],
            "opt_out_policy": {
                "@@operators_allowed_for_child_policies": ["@@none"],
                "@@assign": "optOut"
            }
        }
    }
}

Attach this policy using the AWS CLI:

aws organizations create-policy \
    --content file://ai-opt-out-policy.json \
    --name "AIOptOutPolicy" \
    --type "AIServicesOptOutPolicy"

Then, apply it to your AWS Organization:

aws organizations attach-policy \
    --policy-id <policy-id> \
    --target-id <root-id>

This policy automatically opts out all accounts under your AWS Organization and ensures future AWS AI services won’t collect usage data.

AWS AI Opt-Out: A Process That Should Be Simpler

Opting out of AWS AI training should be a simple toggle switch, not a multi-step IAM policy deployment. AWS has gone to great lengths to ensure organizations don’t accidentally opt out, making the process opaque and unnecessarily complex.

If your business handles sensitive data, is subject to compliance regulations, or simply doesn’t want to train AWS AI for free, opting out is worth the effort. But AWS could and should make this process as transparent as it claims to be.

For now, if you don’t want AWS using your AI service interactions, take the time to opt out manually—because AWS isn’t going to make it easy for you.