Why “zero data retention” may not protect your business data

If you’ve thought twice about sharing proprietary knowledge or customer data with OpenAI or Anthropic, you’re not alone. Data privacy has become a deciding factor for businesses choosing an AI vendor. Fortune reported(new window) this week that zero data retention (ZDR) is now where labs at the frontier of AI innovation are now competing. The promise of ZDR is simple: The vendor processes your prompt, returns an answer, and doesn’t keep a record of it. In practice, though, ZDR is reserved for top-tier customers. It also comes with exceptions (more on that soon), that means a vendor can override their own policy over just a few weeks. On June 9, Anthropic launched its most powerful models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, with a mandatory 30-day retention requirement on all traffic. It applied on every platform the models run on, including AWS Bedrock and Google Vertex AI, and it overrode zero retention agreements some businesses had already signed. Anthropic said the data was needed to detect misuse, would not be used for training, and would be deleted after 30 days “in almost all cases.” Businesses didn’t buy it. Within a day, Microsoft restricted its own employees’ access to Fable(new window) while…