General-purpose AI assistants

ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Perplexity and Le Chat are the tools people bring to work themselves, often before anyone has said yes.

For most uses they also carry the lightest governance on this site. The tool sees nothing unless a person gives it something. Almost every common use touches internal business information only, has a person reading every output, and stays inside the business. We rate most of these uses at the lowest consequence level and ask for an annual look.

So the work here is visibility rather than control. Find out who uses which assistant, and for what. Ask your team rather than monitoring them; the honest answer is worth more than the caught one. Then set one plain rule about what may be pasted in, because a person's clipboard is the only route by which sensitive information reaches these tools.

The picture changes once an assistant drafts customer emails or marketing copy. Personal information and a public audience come into scope, so someone needs to check the output before it leaves. It changes again with Claude Cowork, which can act on your files and records without a person approving each step, putting it closer to the autonomous agents than to its neighbours here.

Open a tool page to see which uses raise the stakes for each assistant, and when we last read the vendor's notes.