OpenAI announced a new way to monitor use of its API on its X account for developers on 5 November. The mode is called Zero Data Retention with Private Safety Processing (ZDR with PSP). Under Zero Data Retention, OpenAI does not retain the content of API requests. PSP adds a safety review whose material stays in the customer’s cloud.

How the review works

OpenAI’s developer guide says a safety classifier or an approved sampling policy selects some prompts and model responses for review. Selection does not mean a policy has been violated, the guide says.

The system encrypts the selected record and writes it to the customer’s regional storage, which can be AWS S3, Azure Blob Storage, Google Cloud Storage or OCI Object Storage. OpenAI keeps an index with operational metadata and a storage reference instead of a copy of the content. Encryption and storage run separately from inference, so they do not slow responses, according to the guide.

The X post says the review takes place in the customer’s environment. The guide’s more detailed description, however, says OpenAI’s Safety Review Runtime carries out the review and fetches the encrypted records from the customer’s storage. It is a hardware-attested computing environment that humans cannot access. OpenAI said it is designed to be the only OpenAI workload that can decrypt the content.

Only predefined, bounded safety signals and approved metadata leave the review in plaintext. Detailed results are encrypted and stored in the customer’s storage.

Records can be encrypted twice. OpenAI controls the inner layer. Customers can add an outer layer with their own key management (Enterprise Key Management, EKM), which OpenAI recommends. If a customer revokes access to the key, the records can no longer be decrypted. The records are not deleted, however, and processing already carried out is not reversed.

OpenAI said the content is used only for safety purposes. It is not used to train models or shared with other teams at the company or with partners.

What customers must do

Customers must retain the encrypted records for at least 30 days and keep their storage and key access permissions in working order. They must also fix configuration errors that OpenAI reports and work with the company to resolve safety concerns it raises.

PSP is enabled per project. It then applies to all API traffic in that project, including models that do not require it. A customer that wants ZDR without PSP needs a separate project. If the project’s last storage connection is disconnected, retention reverts to the organisation’s default, and models that require PSP may no longer be available. Disconnecting storage does not delete stored records.

Organisations already approved for Zero Data Retention can enable PSP in the API console. PSP can also be used with the Modified Abuse Monitoring policy. Setup requires an organisation administrator, a dedicated storage bucket with a 30-day deletion rule and access permission for OpenAI. Detailed instructions are in OpenAI’s developer documentation.