On August 19, 2026, OpenAI published a preview of Private Safety Processing, a mechanism intended to expand safety monitoring across related interactions while preserving the company’s Zero Data Retention (ZDR) promise for eligible API customers.
Why OpenAI says ZDR must evolve
OpenAI said the most serious safety risks often only appear across multiple interactions, for example when bad actors probe safeguards repeatedly, coordinate across accounts, or when an agentic task drifts from its intended goal. The company argued that existing ZDR-compatible systems evaluate each request in isolation and can miss these broader patterns.
How Private Safety Processing works
According to OpenAI, Private Safety Processing extends automated protections so systems can identify patterns across related interactions without granting OpenAI personnel access to the underlying content. Customer content can remain on infrastructure the customer controls (ZDR deployments), or it can be stored on OpenAI infrastructure encrypted with keys controlled by the customer. OpenAI personnel do not hold copies of those keys and therefore cannot access the raw content, the company said.
When automated systems detect potential misuse, OpenAI will receive a narrowly defined safety signal describing the type of activity involved rather than the prompts or model responses themselves. Customers retain the ability to investigate alerts using their own records and may choose to share relevant information with OpenAI to appeal or support investigations.
OpenAI noted an exception tied to legal obligations: like other frontier model providers, it is required by law to report apparent child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Images flagged for possible CSAM will continue to be retained for manual review and reporting even in Zero Data Retention deployments.
Private Safety Processing is being tested with early customers and, per OpenAI, will begin rolling out in September, accompanied by a technical white paper. The company said it will share updates and operational details with customers as the deployment proceeds.
Sunil Agrawal, Chief Information Security Officer at Glean, was quoted as saying that OpenAI’s no-training commitment and ZDR give his organization confidence to build with OpenAI.
Original source: OpenAI News