AI in Business
Zero Data Retention (ZDR) in plain English.
Also known as: ZDR,no data retention,zero retention
The one-sentence version
An API or enterprise setting under which the provider does not store your prompts or outputs after processing the request.
Zero data retention means the AI provider processes your request and keeps nothing afterwards: no prompt logs, no outputs, no training use. It is typically an enterprise or API-level agreement rather than a consumer toggle, because providers normally retain data briefly for abuse monitoring and debugging. The complication is safety review: providers want to check for misuse, which usually means a person or system can see the data. OpenAI's Private Intelligence tier, announced at DevDay 2026, pairs ZDR with "Private Safety Processing", automated safety checks that run without OpenAI staff access, and plans a confidential-computing option for inference. Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft offer their own ZDR arrangements for enterprise customers. If you handle regulated data, ZDR is the setting to ask for first, followed by the data-residency region and whether any sub-processors see the traffic. Note that ZDR covers the provider's side only; your own logs, gateways, and observability tools still hold the data unless configured otherwise.