# Offering Zero Data Retention for frontier models

The system is being tested with early customers, with rollout and a technical white paper planned for September.

- Automated systems analyze patterns across related interactions without giving OpenAI personnel access to prompts or responses.
- Customer content can remain on customer-controlled infrastructure or use OpenAI storage encrypted with customer-controlled keys.
- When potential misuse is detected, OpenAI receives only a limited signal identifying the activity type for possible enforcement.
- Customers may use their own records to investigate decisions and voluntarily share relevant information for appeals or verified-abuse investigations.
- Images flagged as potential CSAM remain subject to retention, manual review, and legally required reporting, including in ZDR deployments.

## Why it matters

Eligible API customers can retain control of sensitive content while gaining safety monitoring across multi-interaction and agentic tasks.

## Sources

- [OpenAI: Offering Zero Data Retention for frontier models](https://openai.com/index/our-commitment-to-zero-data-retention)

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Summarized by dstilled on 2026-08-19. https://dstilled.ai/story/b381f43a-6f2a-4a38-a67c-c7ac07badd0a