30-day retention is out for Anthropic's enterprise users

Anthropic said Tuesday it will replace the 30-day data retention requirement it imposed on business customers in June with a set of controls called Enterprise Frontier Safeguards. The company said the change follows a lot of feedback from enterprise users, according to CNBC.

At a glance

• Enterprise Frontier Safeguards keeps safety scanning on the customer's own infrastructure, with automated monitoring that requires no human review by Anthropic and controls over how data is reviewed, stored and managed.
• The June requirement covered all traffic on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5, was framed as a defense against misuse and cyberattacks, and still applies to non-enterprise subscribers on Mythos-class models.
• Anthropic will not charge for the new controls, which work whether customers reach its models directly or through a cloud provider, and Kate Jensen said the design took hundreds of hours with customers.

The retreat reads less as a safety climbdown than as a commercial calculation: enterprise sales are where Anthropic makes its money, and data handling has turned into a term negotiated at the largest accounts rather than dictated from the vendor side. Moving the scanning onto customer infrastructure likely lets the company hold its safety posture without asking regulated buyers to loosen theirs, a concession that counts for more in procurement than in benchmarks.

Safety scanning runs on customer systems with no Anthropic human review

Enterprise Frontier Safeguards gives businesses control over how their data is reviewed, stored and managed, and supports automated safety monitoring that involves no human review by Anthropic. The controls work whether a company reaches Anthropic's models directly or through a cloud provider, and the company said it will not charge for them.

Kate Jensen, head of Americas at Anthropic, told CNBC that the company spent hundreds of hours working with customers to develop the alternative. She described the result as the scanning Anthropic needs to run, carried out on customer systems and customer data so that buyers do not have to compromise their own privacy posture.

We can do the scanning that we really need to, to help everybody feel confident, but it's on their systems and their data so that they don't have to compromise on their own privacy posture.

The June policy required 30-day retention on all Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 traffic

Anthropic introduced the retention policy in June alongside Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5, two of its most advanced models. It said at the time that a 30-day retention window on all traffic through those models would help it defend against misuse and against cyberattacks it described as complex and novel.

The company also pledged not to use the retained data for any purpose unrelated to safety, model training included, but many of its enterprise users raised concerns regardless. The June policy remains in force for non-enterprise subscribers who use Anthropic's Mythos-class models.

Anthropic, founded in 2021, generates the vast majority of its revenue by selling to enterprises, a market CNBC describes as crucial as the company gears up for what is widely expected to be a massive IPO. Rival OpenAI introduced its own data retention solution earlier this month.

Amodei previewed the safeguards in a CNBC interview on the expanded Salesforce partnership

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei previewed Enterprise Frontier Safeguards last week in a CNBC interview about the company's expanded partnership with Salesforce. He said the approach keeps Salesforce customer data private and helps ensure that Anthropic's models do not run out of control, and he added that the company put a huge amount of effort into managing permissions for the integration between the two.

Anthropic also introduced Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 on Tuesday, the same day it announced the change in retention terms. The company said the two models show improved coding, knowledge work and research capabilities, arriving after the Fable 5 and Mythos 5 launches that the June retention policy accompanied.

Phased rollout into the fall Enterprise Frontier Safeguards will reach customers in phases, and Anthropic said it is aiming for broader availability this fall. Jensen said she feels very confident that the announcement will accelerate deployment, especially on customers' most sensitive workloads. For non-enterprise subscribers on Mythos-class models, the June retention terms remain unchanged.