Four of five Claude cells retain prompts by default

The first release of the AI Data Retention Tracker from ProvenBrief found that four of the five Anthropic model-and-tier cells it could verify against dated provider documents keep prompts by default. The release, dated September 2026, covers Anthropic's commercial surfaces and assigns one retention state per cell.

At a glance

• Retention on Anthropic's surfaces takes three shapes: a default an owner must override, a condition of use accepted to run the model at all, and a floor that cannot be lowered.
• Claude Enterprise conversations and projects are retained indefinitely unless an owner sets a custom period, whose minimum is 30 days counted from last activity; other Copilot Claude models run at zero.
• Organizations running Fable 5 or Fable 5.1 in Copilot without exemption approval face at least 121 days without zero retention, from September 1 to December 31, 2026.

For teams buying Claude under compliance constraints, the tracker's grid reads as a purchasing map rather than a privacy explainer. The distinction that matters is between retention as a setting and retention as a precondition: the first can be configured away, the second cannot be bought off at any tier. That likely reshapes model selection inside regulated organizations, where the newest coding model is also the one with the least configurable data path.

Two Claude models in GitHub Copilot run only if Anthropic retains prompts

Claude Fable 5.1 reached general availability in GitHub Copilot on September 1, 2026, on the Pro+, Max, Business and Enterprise plans, and it runs only if Anthropic retains prompts and outputs to operate its safety classifiers. Claude Fable 5 carries the same requirement.

Copilot Business and Enterprise administrators must switch the model on themselves, and enabling it acknowledges the retention requirement. GitHub's changelog states that the retained data is not used to train Anthropic's models, and that every other Claude model in Copilot operates under zero data retention, a stated window of zero days.

The tracker treats retention and training as separate rows: a prompt can be stored and never become a training example, so the two axes are scored independently. A cell counts as retention-by-default when no available configuration stops prompts from being stored once the model is in use.

Covered Models under a BAA require 30-day retention and cannot use ZDR

Anthropic's Business Associate Agreement terms state that Covered Models require 30-day data retention and are not available with zero data retention enabled. The same document says Claude Code is covered under the BAA only when ZDR is enabled, so those services cannot use Covered Models under the agreement.

Several Claude Code surfaces, among them desktop remote mode, the web beta and Computer Use, are listed as incompatible with ZDR altogether. A HIPAA customer is therefore left without a fully covered corner: chat on a Covered Model means 30-day retention without ZDR, and the remote and web surfaces qualify for neither.

Anthropic shipped custom retention controls for Claude Enterprise on March 16, 2026. Conversations and projects are retained indefinitely by default, and an owner who sets a custom period cannot go below 30 days, counted from last activity. That 30-day floor is the tracker's stated window for the cell.

ZDR Lag puts unapproved Copilot organizations at least 121 days behind

The tracker's second metric, ZDR Lag, counts the days between a model's launch and the date a typical paying customer can run it with zero retention. Enterprises approved under the exemption get it on day zero, with their requests routed to ZDR endpoints.

Eligibility runs through the GitHub account team rather than a published setting, and GitHub Support cannot determine eligibility or enable access. The exemption covers Fable 5.1 and Fable 5 with zero data retention through the end of the calendar year, which the September 1 changelog post fixes at December 31, 2026.

That span is 121 days, and an unapproved Copilot Business organization faces ZDR ineligibility of at least that length. After the exemption lapses, continued use of either Fable model in Copilot requires Enterprise Frontier Safeguards, described as complete privacy equivalent to a zero data retention policy, with data held in customer-controlled cloud infrastructure while automated safety monitoring continues.

When the exemption lapses

The EFS phase-in carries no date beyond "later this fall", so the end of the 121-day window has no fixed successor. GitHub's changelog also states no duration for the retention attached to Fable 5 and Fable 5.1, recording only that retention is required. The tracker's first release maps Anthropic's commercial surfaces alone; other vendors sit outside its scope.