Is Kimi AI safe? Two privacy policies, Chinese law, and the open weights

The Morse teamPublished November 5, 20268 min read

As of November 2026, Kimi AI is safe for everyday questions, but not for anything you'd want kept from Moonshot AI, the Beijing company that makes it. Moonshot's own pages say Kimi trains on your chats until you email to opt out. After you delete your account, its help center says some records are kept under the Cybersecurity Law and the Personal Information Protection Law. Its mainland China service stores your data inside China. Kimi's open-weight models are a separate product: anyone can run them, and a copy running on someone else's servers sends nothing to Moonshot.

We read Kimi's international privacy policy (last updated August 13, 2026), its international terms (effective August 13, 2026), the mainland China privacy policy and user agreement that Moonshot updated on November 5, 2026, Kimi's help center, the API platform's policy and terms, and Kimi's listing on Apple's US App Store, all on November 5, 2026. Quotes from the Chinese-language pages are our translations. Moonshot deserves credit in two places. Its help center says plainly that deleting a chat kills its share links, and its memory feature refuses to store ID or bank card numbers.

Kimi's international service at a glance

For kimi.ai, which Moonshot's help center calls the overseas service, as read on November 5, 2026.

Which Kimi privacy policy applies to you?

The one for where you live, though the iPhone app's store listing points to the mainland China version. Moonshot's help center calls kimi.ai the overseas service, where you sign in with Google or a phone number, and kimi.com the mainland China service, where you use a phone number or WeChat. Our Kimi K3 guide lists the company behind each. The mainland policy Moonshot published on November 5, 2026, which takes effect November 12, now opens by saying it "applies to users located in mainland China" and tells everyone else to "visit kimi.ai" (Kimi).

Apple's US App Store sends you the other way. What its Kimi listing showed on November 5, 2026:

So an American who taps the privacy link on Kimi's US App Store page lands on a policy written for someone else. We couldn't find a Moonshot page that says which policy the app shows a user outside China at sign-up. If you use the app, open the policy linked in its own settings, since continuing to use Kimi counts as agreeing to it.

Does Kimi store your data in China?

Yes, if you use the mainland service. Section 5.1 of the mainland policy says: "We store your personal information within the territory of the People's Republic of China," and Moonshot won't send it abroad unless you give separate consent and the law allows it. The kimi.ai policy names no country at all, as our Kimi K3 guide notes. A dispute over kimi.ai goes to arbitration in Singapore (Kimi), and one over kimi.com goes to a court where Beijing Moonshot is registered (Kimi).

Does Kimi train on your chats?

Yes, on both services, until you email to stop it; there's no switch on kimi.ai, and its opt-out covers only future chats (Kimi). The mainland opt-out reaches further back. Kimi's China help center says a request to support@moonshot.cn is registered within 5 to 7 working days, applies to the whole account rather than one chat, and afterward "neither your historical conversation data nor any newly generated data" goes into training. The same page says Kimi Business, the company plan, keeps enterprise data out of training. Kimi's API help page and its API terms disagree about training, a conflict our Kimi K3 guide quotes in full.

What does Kimi keep after you delete a chat or your account?

Some records, for a period Moonshot doesn't name. Kimi's international help center says a deleted chat can't be recovered, and that the system keeps its data "only to the minimum extent required by applicable laws." After an account is deleted, it says, certain information is kept "as required by the Cybersecurity Law, the Personal Information Protection Law, and other applicable laws," and "used solely for statutory purposes such as law-enforcement verification." Those are the names of two Chinese statutes, and this is the help center that links to the kimi.ai policy. Another help page adds that the kept logs include "operation timestamps and account identifiers." The mainland user agreement says Moonshot keeps your registration data and activity logs after you close your account, under the Cybersecurity Law.

Deleting does reach share links. The same help page says that once a chat is deleted, every link made from it stops working, and "the platform retains no accessible copy of the link." If you upload something like an ID card or a bank card by mistake, Moonshot asks you to delete the chat and then email support@moonshot.ai with the type of document in the subject line. Our guide to AI chat share links compares how other apps handle this.

Who can Moonshot share your Kimi data with?

Its affiliates, its suppliers, ad partners, and authorities. The international policy lists:

• Affiliates, meaning "entities under common ownership or control," for internal administration and product development.
• Service providers, including hosting, moderation tools, push notifications, payments, email, analytics and A/B testing, and anti-fraud partners.
• Ad networks and advertising partners. Kimi may share "a hashed email address or user ID" to link what they know about you, and the policy says this "qualifies as the sale of personal information" under some US state laws. US residents can opt out through the site's "Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information" link.
• Public authorities, courts, or regulators, when Moonshot believes disclosure is "reasonably necessary," judged by "applicable legal standards, including international ones."

The mainland policy lets Moonshot process your data without consent where that's needed for "national security, criminal investigation, trials, and enforcement," or to respond to "instructions from government departments." It also says ad partners get only anonymized data, never your conversations or files, which is a firmer line than the international policy draws.

Is Kimi's model safe if someone else runs it?

For privacy from Moonshot, yes. The international policy covers Moonshot's "website, applications, and browser extensions." Weights you download are files, and whoever runs them decides what's kept. Kimi K3's weights are on Hugging Face under a license Moonshot wrote, the Kimi K3 License, which the Kimi K3 guide walks through.

The weights carry the model's training with them. On December 12, 2025, NIST's Center for AI Standards and Innovation reported that Kimi K2 Thinking is "highly censored in Chinese" but "relatively uncensored in English, Spanish, and Arabic" (NIST). That test covered K2 Thinking, not K3. Qwen faces the same split between the app and the weights, as our page on whether Qwen is safe shows.

How to use Kimi without sending your chats to Moonshot

Every risk above comes from the same place: a Moonshot account, tied to your phone number or Google login, whose rules depend on which policy you landed on. Morse runs Kimi's open weights instead of Kimi's app, so you're not signed in to a Moonshot account and its app policies don't govern your chat. Your history is stored in your browser, encrypted, and Morse doesn't train AI on your chats. A chat you delete is gone from the only place it was kept, and Morse can't bring it back, so save what you need.

• Private, so no host is left holding your Kimi chat. New chats start here. Morse has zero data retention agreements with its inference, search, and other providers, so they keep nothing, and Morse verifies that on each reply where a provider confirms it.
• E2EE, when a policy isn't enough. Kimi also runs in secure enclaves operated by third-party providers, not by Morse. Your browser checks the enclave's attestation before sending, and Morse's servers relay ciphertext they can't read. This rests on the enclave hardware and attestation working as designed. Web search isn't available in E2EE, so search from a Private chat (how the checks work).
• Anonymous, to check Kimi's answer against GPT, Claude, or Gemini. The provider sees the question without knowing it's you, and may keep it for a limited time to check for abuse, under its own policy.

Whichever you choose, Morse doesn't sell your data or show ads, and because it doesn't store your chats, it usually has very little to give authorities.

If you keep using Kimi's app

• Training: email membership@moonshot.ai to opt out, and expect it to cover new chats only. Morse doesn't train on your chats, so there's nothing to request.
• Memory: turn off Chat memory under Settings, then Personalization, and clear Memory Space separately.
• Share links: delete the chat to disable every link made from it.
• Voice: leave My Voice off unless you're fine with a voiceprint kept for up to three years.
• Where your data lives: check which policy your app links to. On Morse, your chat history stays in your browser.

Try a chat from the Morse home page without an account, or start free with no card needed. End-to-end encrypted chats with open-weight models like Kimi come with Pro, at $19 a month.