Your LinkedIn posts might be being used to train AI. Here’s how to opt out.
This week, LinkedIn has begun using member profiles, posts, and resumes to train its AI models, marking a meaningful shift in how the platform handles content.
For those building a personal or business brand, this is important. Your insights, opinions, and experiences may now be used by LinkedIn behind the scenes to power its AI tools, without you having actively opted in.
Here’s what you need to know about how LinkedIn may be using your posts and how small businesses, sole traders, and entrepreneurs can respond.
What LinkedIn is doing with your posts
LinkedIn first announced its new AI plans back in September 2025. Under the updated terms, LinkedIn will now scrape both public and non-public posts, profile data, engagement metrics, and possibly multimedia content to feed its generative AI tools.
The idea is to enhance features such as writing suggestions, analytics, automation tools, and content insight engines.
In addition to your public posts, LinkedIn now also uses some personal data to inform AI, such as job applications, CVs, and your AI usage, and how often you use LinkedIn.
As a subsidiary of Microsoft, LinkedIn’s AI training is part of a wider shift, since its parent company has already introduced AI features, such as Copilot. Similarly, other social media platforms have been pushing similar policies and features.
Strangely, the shift arrives even as LinkedIn has previously said it would penalise AI-generated posts. Platforms seem increasingly focused on developing their AI tools, which makes the question of consent murkier.
While AI and automation might be everywhere now, the stakes feel higher with LinkedIn. It’s a platform people rely on to build their careers, reputation, and income, so debates over content ownership can easily get messy.
How entrepreneurs can protect their content
Understandably, LinkedIn users may feel a little protective of their posts given the site’s 180 flip on AI stance. Your content may help shape the AI tools you’ll one day use. This dynamic complicates content strategy: should you adapt to keep the algorithm happy, or protect your ideas from being mined?
If you’d rather LinkedIn not use your posts to train AI, you can opt out. Fortunately, there’s a setting called “Data for Generative AI Improvement” under Settings, then Data Privacy, where you can toggle off your content being used for generative AI training.
It’s worth noting that opting out only affects data collected after you change the setting, anything LinkedIn has already gathered may still remain in its training datasets.
As LinkedIn’s terms explain, “opting out means that LinkedIn and its affiliates (including Microsoft) won’t use your data to improve models that generate content going forward, but does not affect training that has already taken place.”
If you feel strongly about your content being used at all, you can go a step further and file a Data Processing Objection through LinkedIn’s privacy tools.
While we might be in a new AI era, the internet has always carried risks of imitation. Once you post something online, you surrender a degree of ownership. So, if it’s something you’d rather not see copied like intellectual property or sensitive ideas, keep it off socials for now.
