New Delhi, July 14 -- WASHINGTON - The analyst at a pharmaceutical company who spent last Tuesday refining drug trial summaries in ChatGPT probably did not think of it as a data transaction. The API was licensed. The contract was signed. But according to Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella, something significant was leaving the building all the same.

the proprietary knowledge you must reveal." The post was directed at enterprise buyers, but its subtext runs straight at OpenAI and Anthropic.

The mechanism Nadella labels "exhaust" is the residue of everyday AI use. Every prompt is a data input. Every time a user corrects a model response, flags an output as wrong, or lets an AI agent execute a task on their behalf, they generate signa...