Is Medal.tv Safe? Privacy, AI Training, and Your Clips

Short answer: yes, Medal.tv is safe in the sense most people mean — it is not malware. Independent scanners agree: PCrisk reports 0 of 91 antivirus engines flagging the domain (91/100 trust score), and Scamadviser rates it “very likely safe” on an eight-plus-year-old domain. If your only worry was “will this infect my PC,” you can stop reading and install it.

But “safe” and “private” are two different questions, and most people typing is Medal.tv safe mean both. Medal is a cloud platform first: every clip you save uploads to Medal's servers by default, and — the part almost no review mentions — Medal's own privacy policy (last updated July 13, 2026) says uploaded clips and their metadata can be used to train AI models unless you opt out. That is not a breach or a bug. It is the documented, intended design.

This article does the one thing the scanner pages and reassuring “is it legit” posts skip: it quotes the actual documents — no spyware panic, no conspiracy, just what Medal's privacy policy, funding announcements, and independent scanners say, plus every opt-out path we could verify. Credit where due: a widely shared blog post (jack.cab) first surfaced the AI-training angle; we wrote the calmer, better-cited version. (Disclosure: we make GameClipper Advanced, a local clipping tool that appears near the end.)

What Medal.tv Is — and Why Every Clip Lives in the Cloud

Medal is a free Windows recorder bolted to a social platform, plus companion phone apps. You press a hotkey (or let it auto-clip supported PC games), it grabs the last several seconds, and the clip lands in your Medal library — on Medal's servers. Sharing is two clicks because the file is already uploaded. That convenience is the architecture: saving a clip and uploading it are the same action.

The scale is why the data matters. TechCrunch reports Medal handles roughly 2 billion gaming videos a year from about 10 million monthly active users across tens of thousands of games. That is an enormous pool of gameplay footage on one company's servers — exactly why the next sections exist.

Is Medal.tv a Virus or Malware?

No — and the evidence is boringly consistent. PCrisk's scan returns 0 of 91 antivirus engines flagging medal.tv (91/100 trust score); Scamadviser lands on “very likely safe”; Gridinsoft shows a similar high score on an eight-plus-year domain. These aren't Medal marketing; they're third-party scanners, and they agree.

So why does your antivirus sometimes flag the Medal app? Because Medal, like every game recorder, hooks into running games and installs a capture overlay — behavior that pattern-matches what some malware does, so heuristic engines occasionally throw a false positive. Medal publishes a whitelisting guide for this reason; adding the app to your exceptions is the standard fix. A false positive on a hooking recorder isn't a detection of malicious code — and the multi-engine scans above confirm there's none to detect.

Here's the catch buried in that reassurance: every scanner page measures whether the site will hurt your computer. Not one reads the privacy policy. “Won't infect your PC” and “won't do anything unexpected with your footage” are different guarantees, and the scanners cover only the first.

What Data Does Medal Collect?

Medal's privacy policy is a GDPR-style document, and you can verify the claims below against its own section headings — among them What Personal Data are processed by Medal, Do we share your Personal Data with others?, and Our role as Joint Controller. The structure alone tells you this is more than a recorder.

The headline category is the clips themselves — your gameplay video, including audio, plus the labels and metadata on each one (game, timestamps, match context). Beyond that, the policy's AI-transfer clause enumerates the account-level data it holds by listing what gets stripped before any research transfer: user identifiers, IP addresses, hardware identifiers, donation links, profile and cover pictures, biographies, and language settings. If it can strip those items, it collects them. None of this is unusual for a social platform — but if you assumed a “clip recorder” only touched video, the policy says otherwise. Read it yourself before deciding.

The Part Most Reviews Skip: Medal, General Intuition, and AI Training

In October 2025, Medal's team spun out an AI lab, General Intuition; Pim de Witte co-founded Medal and is CEO of both. TechCrunch reports the lab raised a $133.7 million seed round led by Khosla Ventures and General Catalyst, with Raine participating, to train AI agents in spatial and temporal reasoning — game NPCs, robotics, search-and-rescue drones. Its core asset is a dataset of gameplay video. Where does that footage come from? Medal.

The privacy policy makes the link explicit: Medal B.V. and General Intuition Inc. are named GDPR joint controllers for training data, and the policy says uploaded clips and metadata may be shared to build AI algorithms:

“Any uploaded Clips and associated labels and metadata may be shared with third parties to facilitate the creation of data algorithms, data-based features, or AI algorithms.” — Medal privacy policy, as of July 2026

To Medal's credit, the same policy states real safeguards worth weighing equally. Before any research transfer, it says data “not necessary for this purpose” (the identifiers listed above) is removed, and “additional safeguards such as pseudonymisation are applied where feasible.” Transfers out of the EEA ride on standard contractual clauses. This is opt-out data use with identifier stripping, not a raw feed of your named footage handed to a stranger.

Two things to attribute honestly. Per The Information (via TechCrunch), OpenAI reportedly approached Medal about a ~$500 million acquisition in late 2024, which neither company would confirm — widely repeated, but a reported figure, not a document we can quote. And the defense-flavored details in that blog post (a security-clearance job listing, a Palantir logo) are that author's observations, not anything in a primary document we read — one blogger's reporting, not established fact.

How to Opt Out of AI Training on Medal (Step by Step)

The opt-out is real, with several routes. It is opt-out, not opt-in — training is on unless you turn it off — and the in-app path moved around March 2026, which is why guides pointing at the old location strand you.

1. In-app toggle (current): open Settings > Medal AI and turn the training/research option off.
2. In-app toggle (old path, now moved): it used to live at Settings > Privacy and Security > Privacy and Visibility > Research and Development. If your app still shows that layout, use it; otherwise it is under Medal AI now.
3. On the web: use the “Your Privacy Choices” link on Medal's homepage.
4. By email: write to privacy@medal.tv with the subject “Exercising Privacy Right” to file a formal request.

Two caveats, stated plainly. First, the policy contains a retention clause: clips already folded into a research dataset can outlive your deletion.

“Clips, associated metadata, and where applicable data derived from such Clips that have already been incorporated into an existing research dataset may … be retained and used for research purposes for a limited period necessary to preserve dataset integrity and reproducibility. This period will generally not exceed 12 months from the moment the Clip is deleted.” — Medal privacy policy, as of July 2026

Second, a browser-based opt-out (rather than one tied to your logged-in account) is stored against that browser — clearing cache or switching devices can reset it. The in-app account toggle is more durable.

How to Make Your Medal Clips Private

This is a separate control from AI training, and conflating the two is the most common mistake we see. Clip visibility governs who can watch; the Medal AI toggle governs whether clips feed model training. A private clip is not opted out of research, and opting out of research does not make public clips private — if you want both, set both.

To manage visibility, open a clip (or your upload defaults in Settings) and set it public, unlisted, or private. Changing the default so new clips are private on creation is what most how-to videos point at — do it once and every future clip starts locked down, then handle the AI toggle separately.

So, Is Medal.tv Safe? An Honest Verdict

Split the question into the three things people are really asking, and it resolves cleanly.

For most players the answer is simple: Medal is safe, flip the Medal AI toggle if the training bothers you, and move on. For those who don't want their footage on someone else's servers at all, a toggle is the wrong instrument — a toggle is a promise you have to trust.

If You Want Clips That Never Leave Your PC

Here is the structural point that reframes everything above. An opt-out toggle is a policy promise: it can move (it just did), reset on a cache clear, or change wording next update. Local-only software is a guarantee: if a tool has no upload feature, your footage cannot leave your machine, whatever any policy says next year. For privacy-first players, that's the whole game.

Plenty of good local tools exist, none of which upload by design. OBS Studio's Replay Buffer is free, open-source, and saves the last N seconds to disk on a hotkey. ShareX captures clips locally (skip its optional upload step). NVIDIA ShadowPlay and AMD ReLive give instant replay straight to a local file on their respective GPUs. All four are recorders, though — they capture; they don't find your best moments for you.

That last gap — finding the highlights inside a long recording — is where our own tool fits (bias flagged). GameClipper Advanced is a Windows app that scans a file you already recorded, reads the on-screen kill feed, and pulls out every kill, then builds an editable montage and exports via your GPU. It works from any recorder's file (ShadowPlay, OBS, a capture card) and is game-agnostic because it reads the feed rather than integrating per game — so it can clip only your kills, not your teammates' via OCR name confirmation — and it never uploads: no account, no cloud, no queue. The free version does the full scan, edit, and export with a small watermark; a one-time $19 removes it, no subscription. It sits in our roundup of clip software without a subscription, alongside a fuller list of local Medal.tv alternatives.

So, is Medal.tv safe? As software on your PC, yes — the scanners are unanimous and there's no known breach. As a home for your footage, it's a cloud platform that trains AI on clips by default, with a real opt-out and real safeguards you should read at medal.tv/privacy. If flipping one toggle settles it, Medal is a fine choice. If you'd rather the question never came up, keep your clips local from the start: download GameClipper Advanced free and point it at last night's VOD without an account, or check the one-line pricing first.