Zero data retention

Zero data retention (ZDR) is an org-level toggle in Gateway. When enabled, Gateway only routes your requests to vendors that have a contractual zero data retention agreement, so your prompts and completions are not stored by the vendor, used for model training, or used for model improvement.

How it works

• Org-level toggle. ZDR is a single setting on your organization. It applies to every project, every API key, and every request.
• Routing is filtered. When ZDR is on, Gateway restricts each request’s routing candidates to ZDR-eligible vendors only. Non-eligible vendors are never selected, even if they appear in your routing policy.
• Fail-closed. If a request resolves to a routing policy with no ZDR-eligible vendors, Gateway rejects it with HTTP 400 and an error message that includes the phrase “Zero Data Retention”. Gateway does not silently fall back to a non-eligible vendor.

Eligible vendors

The following vendors are currently covered by a zero data retention agreement:

More vendors are added as agreements are signed. For the authoritative per-model list, call GET /v1/models and filter on the zero_data_retention field on each model object.

When to enable it

Turn ZDR on when your workload has any of the following characteristics:

• Regulated data. You send PII, PHI, or financial data that falls under HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2, PCI, or a similar framework.
• Customer contracts that prohibit training on their data. Many enterprise agreements forbid third-party model providers from retaining or learning from customer content.
• Regulated industries. Healthcare, legal, financial services, and government workloads that require an audit trail showing no vendor retention.
• Confidential product content. Pre-release roadmap, source code, internal strategy docs, or anything covered by an NDA.
• Customer-facing AI features where data provenance matters. If you market your product as “your data stays yours,” ZDR lets you enforce that claim at the routing layer rather than through per-vendor configuration.

Enabling ZDR

Open the Vendor configuration page and flip the Zero data retention toggle. The change takes effect on the next request. No code changes are required on your side.

Error shape

When ZDR is on and a request cannot be routed to any eligible vendor, Gateway returns:

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{
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  "error": {
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    "type": "invalid_request_error",
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    "message": "Zero Data Retention: no eligible vendor is available for this request.",
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    "code": 400
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  }
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}

Handle this like any other invalid_request_error. The stable signal to match on is HTTP 400 with a message containing Zero Data Retention.

Checking ZDR status per model

Each model exposes a zero_data_retention boolean. Filter the model list to see exactly which models your app can use while ZDR is on.

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from merge_gateway import MergeGateway
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client = MergeGateway(api_key="YOUR_API_KEY")
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models = client.models.list()
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zdr_models = [m for m in models.data if m.zero_data_retention]
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for m in zdr_models:
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    print(m.id)

FAQ

Next steps