How to Answer Legal and Security Questions About AI Coding Tools

legal and security review is a governance question before it is a tooling one. Four controls decide whether security can sign off: who has access, what the policy allows, how data moves, and whether anyone is measuring adoption. The table assigns each an owner.

The owners column matters more than the controls themselves, which I realise is a slightly odd thing to say about a governance table. But a control with nobody's name against it is a control nobody checks, and it fails at exactly the moment someone has to answer for it. The usual mistake is assuming security owns all four. They don't. Identity is IT's system of record, policy is an engineering-leadership call about what the team is allowed to ship, and adoption belongs to whoever owns developer experience. Security owns the data-flow question and the audit path, and they will ask about both.

Data flow is the one that stalls approvals, so answer it before the meeting rather than during it. Write down what the tool can read, what it can change, what leaves your network and where any of it is retained. Most of that comes straight from the vendor's documentation and your own configuration. It's dull work, but it turns a vague objection into a specific one, and specific objections are the kind you can actually close.

A rollout works when it starts narrow and earns its expansion. One team, one repo and a few real tasks in week one, with policy and training in place before anyone scales it wider.

1. 1Week 1: pick one team, one repo and three realistic tasks.
2. 2Week 2: write the workflow standard from the pilot.
3. 3Week 3: train champions and add policy guardrails.
4. 4Week 4: expand only after quality, cost and review load are visible.

Four weeks is a shape, not a rule. The dates matter much less than the order, and the reason to start with a single team is that those first two weeks are mostly you finding out what your standard should even say. You can't write that from a pilot too broad to watch properly. Pick the team that will tell you when something doesn't work, rather than the team most likely to hand you a good result.

Expansion is where this usually goes wrong. Not because anyone's careless, either — the pilot went well, someone senior noticed, and now there's pressure. That's a hard thing to say no to. Before you add teams, though, check that you can answer three things with numbers instead of impressions: did review load go up or down, what does a developer actually cost per month, did quality hold. If any of those is a shrug, another fortnight of the same pilot beats a rollout you have to walk back.

Cursor ships often, so here is the current state of the surfaces this page touches. Each row links to the source where you can confirm the detail.

The retention one. Privacy ModeCursor's setting that guarantees code data is not used for training by Cursor or its model providers, and that an admin can enforce org-wide; data-retention terms are a separate, contractual layer. Press Enter for the full definition. guarantees your code is never used for training, by Cursor or by the model providers, and most models run under zero-data-retention agreements so providers do not store inputs. It does not mean the code stays inside your network. Code is still sent to a provider to generate the response. That distinction is the answer, and a reviewer who hears it from you rather than finding it in the docs reads the rest of your answers differently.

The expensive part of getting it slightly wrong is not the correction.

A reviewer who catches one overclaim tends to reopen every other answer you gave them, including the accurate ones, and a review that was nearly finished is suddenly two weeks from finished.

The deployment question behaves the same way. There is no on-prem or single-tenant option. Inference runs on Cursor's infrastructure or a third-party provider's, and self-hosted cloud-agent runners keep tool execution on your own machines. That second thing is a real answer to a narrower question, and a reviewer who has read the docs will know the difference between the two claims.

That three separate surfaces answer three separate questions, and the audit log is not the one they are picturing. Cursor's audit log covers security events and administrative actions on the Enterprise plan: logins, user additions and removals, role changes, API keys, spend limits, team settings, Privacy ModeCursor's setting that guarantees code data is not used for training by Cursor or its model providers, and that an admin can enforce org-wide; data-retention terms are a separate, contractual layer. Press Enter for the full definition. changes, team rules and hooks. Agent responses and generated code are not in it.

For the code itself Cursor's own recommendation is hooks. A prompts-submitted hook records when a prompt is sent, a code-generated hook records when code is written, and both post to a compliance endpoint you own. Cursor's guidance alongside that, and it is the line worth repeating in the meeting, is to log metadata rather than content, since prompts and diffs carry the sensitive strings you were trying to protect.

Then the after-the-fact question, which is usually the one underneath the request. Cursor BlameAn augmented git blame that records line-level human and agent co-authorship, so you can trace which code was written by AI versus a person. Press Enter for the full definition. augments git blame with line-level human and agent co-authorship, so during an incident you can tell which lines came from an agent before anyone opens a diff.

Send the documents. Cursor's SOC 2 Type II report is available on request through trust.cursor.com, along with penetration-test summaries and data-flow documentation, and the standard DPAData Processing Agreement. The contract spelling out exactly how a vendor may process your data: purposes, subprocessors, retention and breach duties. The document privacy reviews actually read. Press Enter for the full definition. is published at cursor.com/dpa. An artifact a reviewer can file closes faster than a paragraph they have to transcribe out of your email.

One caveat to send with them: an attestation has a scope, and asking what sits inside that scope is a fair question to put in writing.

The instinct is to answer the questions you were handed. I'd revise that: answer them, then volunteer the limit nobody asked about. The limits get found either way, and a reviewer who finds one on their own starts auditing everything else you said, which costs you more time than the disclosure would have.

Team size changes the deliverable more than it changes the facts. On a small team the person asking is someone you can talk to, so being exact about what the tool does matters more than paperwork. Past that, vendor risk wants artifacts with dates on them, and a security lead's comfort is not something a procurement process can attach to a record.