OpenAI has unveiled Private Safety Processing, a system designed to let it scan customer interactions with its AI models for safety risks without breaching its Zero Data Retention (ZDR) commitments. The move appears aimed at winning over business customers who prioritise data privacy, positioning OpenAI as offering stronger data protection guarantees than rival Anthropic, which has acknowledged that its own ZDR policy still involves retaining some data for safety purposes.

Anthropic has confirmed that, since 9 June 2026, prompts and outputs from its top-tier models (Mythos 5 and Fable 5) are retained for 30 days under ZDR agreements to support safety reviews, with human staff able to access flagged content via a controlled process. OpenAI's approach differs in that customers using ZDR deployments can control the infrastructure themselves or store data on OpenAI's systems, where encryption keys will soon be customer-controlled; automated systems flag potential misuse without exposing content to OpenAI staff, with human review reserved narrowly for suspected child exploitation material. Full technical details of Private Safety Processing are expected to be published next month.