DataGrail report finds your vendor may be sending data to AI models you never approved

The data processing agreement (DPA) — the bedrock contract companies use to evaluate how vendors handle personal data — can no longer be trusted at face value. That is the central, and arguably most alarming, conclusion of DataGrail's Privacy and AI Trends Report 2026, released today.The San Francisco-based privacy platform analyzed 2,400 popular business software providers and found that 63.6% of vendors that prominently advertise AI capabilities do not disclose a third-party AI subprocessor in their legal documentation. The implication: the majority of companies purchasing AI-enabled software may be unknowingly exposing their customers' data to AI models and pipelines they never reviewed, never approved, and may not even know exist."All software vendors are trying to move to become AI ve