Zero Data Retention (ZDR) is a feature posture in enterprise LLM platforms where the provider commits not to retain customer prompts or completions beyond the synchronous request lifetime. No training, no logging beyond the response, no human review.
Anthropic, OpenAI Enterprise, and Google Vertex offer ZDR as a contractual term. The trade-off: some advanced features (caching, batching, model improvements from feedback) become unavailable or work differently under ZDR. Enterprises with sensitive workloads (financial, legal, healthcare, regulated industries) trade those features for the audit posture ZDR provides.
For India + GCC + UK enterprise customers, ZDR pairs with regional inference endpoints (e.g. Anthropic on AWS Mumbai for data residency) to satisfy both retention + locality requirements.