Someone on our Telegram asked me last week whether a certain AI provider was "private." I gave a two sentence answer, then spent the next ten minutes untangling it, because the question was hiding two completely different questions inside it.
Here is the short version. Private AI means the provider cannot read the content of your prompt. Anonymous AI means the provider cannot tell the prompt came from you. Those are separate properties. A service can give you one and none of the other, and honestly, most of them do.
If you only remember one thing from this post, remember that. Everything below is just working out the consequences.
Two axes, not one
Every AI privacy claim I have ever read collapses into two independent questions:
