CIO GUIDE:
Frontier Lab Customer Data and Zero Data Retention
A CIO guide to confidential and sensitive data retention by frontier labs, and hybrid inference as a solution
Your ZDR agreement may protect less than you think.
Zero Data Retention can prevent covered prompts and outputs from being stored. It does not eliminate provider processing, retained derivatives, safety exceptions, stateful product data, or exposure through connected systems.
This CIO-focused white paper explains where sensitive information can remain visible and provides a practical framework for deciding when to use frontier APIs, hyperscaler-hosted models, or sovereign inference.
What you’ll learn
What ZDR covers – and which files, caches, metadata, safety records, agent state, and tool activity may fall outside it
Why proprietary methods, intent, and usage patterns can be as sensitive as the underlying documents
What to ask providers about who can inspect retained data, under which policy, for what purpose, and for how long
How to govern a hybrid model that preserves access to frontier capabilities while keeping high-consequence workloads under enterprise control
