Zoom AI Companion Privacy Settings: What It Records and How to Turn It Off

Last updated: 2026-07-16

The Short Answer

Zoom AI Companion generates meeting summaries, searchable transcripts, and smart chapters by default on most Pro, Business, and Enterprise accounts — and depending on your admin's configuration, it can also feed anonymized content back into Zoom's model training pipeline. You can turn all of it off, but the controls are split between three places: your personal settings, the host's in-meeting toggle, and your organization's admin console. If you only fix one of these, the other two can still leave you exposed.

Here's what AI Companion actually captures, where that data goes, and the specific settings to change today — whether you're a host who controls the account or a participant who doesn't.

What AI Companion Actually Captures

AI Companion isn't one feature — it's a bundle of several, each with its own data footprint:

Meeting Summary transcribes the full audio of a call and generates a structured recap (topics, decisions, action items) that gets emailed to the host and, depending on settings, to all participants automatically after the meeting ends.

Smart Recording timestamps and chapters a cloud recording, and generates highlight reels and searchable topic markers within the recording itself.

AI Companion Q&A lets anyone with access to a recorded or transcribed meeting later ask it questions like "what did we decide about the Q3 budget" and get an answer pulled from the transcript — meaning the raw transcript persists somewhere queryable long after the call ends. This is a variant of a problem that isn't unique to Zoom: any meeting bot with an AI layer creates the same persistent, queryable record, whether you're the one who scheduled the call or not.

In-meeting chat and query features let the host or participants ask AI Companion questions live during the call, which get logged alongside the transcript.

The common thread: every one of these features requires a full-fidelity transcript of everything said in the meeting, stored on Zoom's servers, to function. There's no version of "summary without transcript."

Where That Data Lives, and Zoom's Training Policy

Zoom's current policy is that it does not use audio, video, or chat content to train its own or third-party AI models without account-level opt-in — a change from the broader default Zoom shipped and then walked back in 2023 after public pushback. That's a meaningfully better default than it used to be, but two things are worth knowing:

The opt-in is set at the account level by an admin, not per-user. If your employer's Zoom admin has enabled "AI Companion data sharing for product improvement," every meeting on that account contributes to training data, and you won't see a per-meeting prompt asking your permission.

Even with training turned off, the transcript, summary, and recording still get stored on Zoom's cloud infrastructure for as long as your account's retention policy allows — commonly 90 days to indefinitely on Business and Enterprise plans. Storage and training are two separate settings, and turning off one does not turn off the other.

If you want to know your organization's actual configuration, the honest answer is: ask your IT or security team directly, or check the admin console yourself if you have access. Zoom's public documentation describes the defaults, but individual accounts frequently override them. If your workplace runs on Microsoft 365 instead of (or alongside) Zoom, the same audit applies to Copilot's access to your meetings and files — the admin-vs-personal-settings split is nearly identical.

The Host-vs-Participant Gap

This is the part most privacy guides skip: your ability to control AI Companion depends entirely on whether you're hosting the meeting or joining someone else's.

As a host, you control whether AI Companion is enabled for that specific meeting, whether the summary is auto-shared with participants, and whether a recording is saved to cloud or local storage.

As a participant, your options are much thinner. You can see (usually) whether AI Companion is active via a notification banner when the host enables it. You can decline to have your camera or specific audio segments included in some configurations. But you generally cannot stop the host's AI Companion from transcribing your side of the conversation — your only real lever is raising it before the meeting starts, or leaving.

If you're regularly on calls where you don't control the account, the practical fix isn't a Zoom setting — it's a conversation with whoever schedules the call about whether AI Companion needs to be on for that particular conversation, especially for anything involving compensation, legal matters, or client-confidential material.

How to Turn It Off (Host and Admin Settings)

If you have host or admin access, here's where the actual toggles live:

Personal account: Settings → AI Companion → toggle off "Meeting Summary," "Smart Recording," and "AI Companion Q&A" individually. Each has its own switch; disabling one doesn't disable the others.
Per-meeting: When scheduling, under "Meeting Options," you can disable AI Companion for that specific call even if it's enabled account-wide — useful for one-off sensitive conversations without changing your default.
Admin console (if you manage the account): Admin → AI Companion → Account Settings, where you control whether AI Companion is available at all, whether it's on by default for new meetings, and — critically — the toggle for "Help improve Zoom's AI services" (the data-sharing-for-training setting). Turn this off at the account level if it's on; it's not something individual hosts can override once set.
Recording retention: Admin → Recording Management → set an explicit auto-delete window instead of leaving cloud recordings and transcripts to accumulate indefinitely.

None of these are hidden exactly, but they're spread across three different menus, which is why most accounts never get fully locked down — someone flips one toggle and assumes the rest followed.

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What to Do With Meeting Notes You Actually Want to Keep

The instinct after disabling AI Companion is to lose the convenience of automatic summaries entirely. You don't have to. The better pattern for anything you actually want a record of — client calls, performance conversations, technical design reviews — is to separate "getting a summary" from "storing it on a third-party's cloud indefinitely."

Run the transcription locally (a local Whisper setup or a self-hosted meeting bot works fine for this — we cover the setup in our local AI transcription tools guide), generate your summary with a model you control, and then store the output somewhere with real encryption guarantees instead of a SaaS retention policy set by an admin you've never met.

This is exactly the gap Tresorit is built for. It's zero-knowledge, end-to-end encrypted storage — Tresorit never holds your decryption keys, so a subpoena or a breach on their end gets an attacker encrypted blobs, not your meeting transcripts. For anything client-facing or regulated (legal, healthcare, financial services), that's a materially different risk profile than a Zoom cloud recording sitting on shared infrastructure with a 90-day default retention window. Drop your exported transcripts and recordings into a Tresorit folder instead of leaving them in Zoom's cloud, and you control the retention window, not your meeting platform's admin defaults. If Tresorit isn't the right fit, our roundup of encrypted cloud storage for AI workflows covers the other options worth comparing.

Locking Down the Account Itself

The other half of this is making sure the account scheduling and receiving these meetings isn't itself a weak point. Zoom accounts tied to a work Gmail or Outlook address are a single credential-stuffing attempt away from someone gaining access to months of stored recordings and transcripts — see our guide to locking AI and meeting accounts down with passkeys for the full setup, not just the password reuse problem.

If you're setting up meetings you want kept private — client consultations, hiring conversations, anything under NDA — schedule and receive the auto-generated summaries through a Proton Mail address instead of your primary work or personal inbox. Proton's zero-access encryption means the summary email itself isn't sitting in a mailbox Google or Microsoft can scan for ad targeting or feed into their own AI training pipelines, and Proton's phishing protections cut down the risk of a compromised inbox becoming the weak link that exposes everything Zoom already stored. It's a small architectural change — a dedicated, encrypted inbox for meeting-related correspondence — but it closes a gap that most people never think about until an account gets compromised.

Quick Reference Checklist

Check whether AI Companion is on by default for your account (personal settings or ask your admin)
Disable Meeting Summary, Smart Recording, and Q&A individually if you don't want them — they don't share one switch
Confirm the account-level "help improve Zoom's AI services" training toggle is off
Set an explicit recording/transcript retention window instead of leaving the default
For sensitive one-off calls, disable AI Companion per-meeting rather than changing your account default
If you're a participant with no host control, raise it before the call — you have almost no in-meeting recourse
Move recordings and transcripts you actually need into encrypted storage you control, on a retention schedule you set

None of these settings are complicated once you know where they live. The problem is that they're scattered, the defaults favor data collection, and almost nobody audits all three levels — personal, per-meeting, and admin — at once.

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