How to anonymize a Word document before sending it to an AI
Lawyers, accountants and other professionals cannot paste client data into a cloud AI: professional secrecy, the GDPR and the LGPD all forbid it. The safe route is pseudonymization on your own computer, before anything reaches the AI. This guide shows the manual way, its limits, and a faster local workflow with Redact for AI.
The manual way and its limits
Find-and-replace inside Word gets you started, but it misses repeated variants and partial names, produces inconsistent placeholders, and offers no way to restore the real names in the AI's answer. One missed occurrence is enough to leak client data. On scanned PDFs there is nothing to find-and-replace at all — the text is an image.
Step by step with Redact for AI
- 01
Download and open Redact for AI
Works on macOS 13+ (Apple Silicon and Intel) and Windows 10+. Everything runs offline, on your machine.
- 02
Open the file
Drop a .docx, .pdf or .txt into the app. Scanned PDFs go through built-in local OCR.
- 03
Automatic local detection
The document is analyzed on your computer. Every name, tax identifier and address becomes a consistent placeholder such as Person_1 or Client_1.
- 04
Review with highlights
A side-by-side preview shows every replacement. Add anything missed with one selection — the way you redact client data by hand, only faster.
- 05
Assign roles (optional)
Mark who is the Client and who is the Opposing party so the AI gets readable context instead of bare codes.
- 06
Copy into your AI
Paste the anonymized text into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or any other assistant. Only placeholders reach the model.
- 07
Restore the real names
Paste the AI's draft into the Restore tab. Placeholders map back on your computer; the mapping file never leaves it.
Scanned PDFs work too
Redact for AI ships with local OCR — Apple Vision on macOS, Tesseract on Windows — in English, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. Scanned contracts and mail archives are handled the same way as native Word documents.
Frequently asked questions
Does my document leave my computer?
No. Redact for AI works with the connection off — nothing is uploaded, ever.
Is it reversible?
Yes. A local mapping file restores the real names in the AI's output. The mapping never leaves your machine.
Can the AI still reason about the document?
Yes. Placeholders are consistent, so Client_1 stays the same entity throughout the document and the model can follow the argument.
Does it keep Word formatting?
The anonymized output is plain text to paste into the AI. The original .docx file is never modified.
How much does it cost?
Redact for AI is free, always. There are no paid plans.