Atlassian Now Trains Its AI on Your Work by Default — and Full Opt-Out Is an Enterprise Feature

If you run a team on Jira or Confluence, the deal changed on 17 August and the change was opt-out. From that date, by Atlassian’s own account, the content your team writes into its Cloud products — Confluence pages, Jira tickets, the descriptions and comments where the actual work lives — is used by default to train Rovo, Atlassian’s AI assistant. You were not asked to opt in. You were, at best, given a switch and left to find it. Answer first, because the detail matters more than the outrage: there are two settings, and they are not equal. One governs your in-app data — the text itself. The other governs metadata — the derived signals about that text. On the Free, Standard and Premium plans you can turn off the content, but the metadata switch is greyed out; Atlassian’s support page reads, flatly, “You can’t change this setting.” The full off switch, the one that also stops metadata contribution, is available only on Enterprise. Privacy, in other words, is now a plan tier. What actually changed, with the switches named Atlassian’s data-contribution documentation lays out a matrix that is worth reading slowly, because the defaults are doing the heavy lifting. In-app data contribution defaults to on for Free and Standard customers and off for Premium and Enterprise. Every tier can toggle that one. Metadata contribution is a different story: it is on across the board and can only be switched off by Enterprise. So the customer contributing the most by default — content and metadata, both on, no ability to fully stop it — is the one on the cheapest plan who never opened the settings page. The categories are broad. In-app data, per Atlassian’s materials, covers Confluence page titles and body text, Jira work-item titles, descriptions and comments, and custom status and workflow names. Metadata covers the derived layer: readability scores, task classifications (that a ticket is “sales work,” say), story points, sprint end dates, SLA values, and semantic-similarity measure