Bottom line: OpenAI confirms the continued availability of Zero Data Retention for eligible API customers and announces Private Safety Processing, a procedure intended to enable safety checks without persistent data storage.
OpenAI confirms that eligible API customers can continue to use the Zero Data Retention (ZDR) option, under which no request and response data is stored. In addition, the company announces Private Safety Processing, a procedure intended to enable safety checks without compromising user data privacy.
OpenAI has confirmed that the existing Zero Data Retention (ZDR) option for qualified API customers will continue. When ZDR is enabled, OpenAI does not store input and output data transmitted via the API beyond the duration necessary to process the request. The company also announces Private Safety Processing as a new procedure intended to enable advanced safety checks of AI models without requiring customer data to be permanently stored or viewed by employees.
For CISOs and privacy officers in regulated industries, the availability of ZDR is a key criterion in deciding whether and how frontier models may be deployed in production environments. In particular, companies with requirements under GDPR, banking regulation, or health data protection need contractual and technical assurances that sensitive prompt and response content does not remain with a third party. The announcement of Private Safety Processing addresses a previously unresolved trade-off: safety filtering and abuse detection generally require some form of content analysis, which is difficult to reconcile with strict data minimization.
The announcement does not specify which technical mechanisms Private Safety Processing will actually use, which models it will initially be available for, or when general availability is planned. CISOs who have already contractually agreed to ZDR or are planning to do so should use this announcement as an opportunity to clarify with their OpenAI point of contact the exact requirements for Zero Data Retention eligibility and the rollout timeline for Private Safety Processing before incorporating such assurances into internal approval processes or data processing agreements.
Source: openai.com · Published August 19, 2026
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