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Coaching — Trade Secrets & Strategic IP

Why it's risky​

Strategic IP is information whose value depends on its secrecy: pricing strategies, M&A plans, financial forecasts pre-publication, product roadmaps, customer lists, supplier contracts, manufacturing processes, marketing strategies, R&D outputs.

Sending strategic IP to a public LLM means:

  1. Insider-trading exposure — if you handle material non-public information (MNPI) about a listed company, exposing it to a third party may breach SEC/AMF regulations even without intent to trade.
  2. Competitive contamination — public LLMs serve every user including your competitors. Even with no-training policies, prompts may surface in operational logs, support sessions, or model fingerprinting.
  3. Trade-secret void — same logic as source code: confidentiality must be reasonably maintained for legal protection. Pasting a strategic doc breaks that.
  4. Negotiating-position leakage — if you draft an M&A offer or contract negotiation in a public LLM, you assume the counterparty has not done the same. They probably have. Your private number is now a public guess.

Examples​

"Help me draft a counter-offer for the Acme acquisition. Our walk-away price
 is 180M, target is 220M, board pre-approved up to 240M..."
"Summarise this quarterly forecast — Q3 revenue will miss by 12%, layoffs
 expected in EMEA..."
"Optimise this Excel — list of our top 50 customers ranked by CLV with
 churn risk score..."

Best practice​

  • Abstract one level up — replace specific numbers with placeholders or ranges. "an acquisition with target valuation in the $200M range" instead of literal numbers.
  • Strip identifiers — never name the counterparty, the customer, the supplier.
  • Use "what-if" framing — ask the LLM about generic negotiation tactics, not your specific case.
  • Reserve real strategy work for offline tools or contracted endpoints — strategic work belongs in tools where data residency, retention and access control are auditable.

Alternative phrasing​

❌ Risky:

"Draft a press release announcing our $180M acquisition of Acme by Q3 2026, leveraging their patent portfolio in solid-state batteries to accelerate our EV roadmap."

✅ Safe:

"What's a standard structure for a press release announcing the acquisition of a hardware startup, with emphasis on technology integration and customer continuity?"

References​