You can give local AIs access to the internet, but you don’t have to. You can restrict it to search-only, or you can give it access to tools that have the capability to write/send information. Even then, if you’re in control of the system prompt and the chat software, it won’t have some of the safeguards that an online chatbot does and your model itself would have to decide to snitch on you - on online chatbots I suspect that any such thing is implemented as a separate feature, not baked into the models themselves.
You can give local AIs access to the internet, but you don’t have to. You can restrict it to search-only, or you can give it access to tools that have the capability to write/send information. Even then, if you’re in control of the system prompt and the chat software, it won’t have some of the safeguards that an online chatbot does and your model itself would have to decide to snitch on you - on online chatbots I suspect that any such thing is implemented as a separate feature, not baked into the models themselves.