I’m looking for advice from anyone who has successfully reached through to sales to enable Zero Data Retention (ZDR) when using the API (the process described in the docs, which I can’t link to here).
I’m building an edtech product deploying into U.S. K–12 schools, and district security reviews require confirmation that our LLM provider supports ZDR so prompts and outputs are not retained beyond the request lifecycle. This is tied to FERPA and COPPA compliance for student data.
The documentation says to contact Sales about ZDR eligibility. I’ve submitted the Contact Sales form multiple times over the past two months and only receive automated replies pointing back to the same documentation. I also contacted OpenAI support, who said the request was routed internally but I haven’t heard anything further.
I tried reaching out to the BAA team as well, as suggested by other messages in this forum. They responded that BAAs are only for healthcare use cases and directed me back to the same sales contact form.
This is now blocking deployments with schools that are otherwise ready to onboard.
If anyone here has successfully gone through the Data Retention / ZDR approval process, I’d appreciate any advice on how you were able to reach the right team or move the request forward.
Totally understand how blocking this can be, especially with school deployments waiting.
Short answer: Sales is the correct team for Zero Data Retention (ZDR) requests. They handle eligibility and enablement for ZDR. The volume of sales inquiries has been quite high, which can sometimes slow down responses.
Since you mentioned Support said your request was routed internally, there may already be an active ticket in progress.
If you’re able to share the support case number( it should be 8 digit number), I can help check on the status and see if there’s any update on that ticket.
I wanted to make one final request for escalation.
We’ve now been approved by Google to enable Zero Data Retention (ZDR) for our product on Vertex AI. Our preference is to stay with OpenAI, but ZDR is a blocking requirement for our U.S. K–12 deployments, and we have not received a response after multiple attempts over several months.
We have customers ready to onboard and will need to proceed with migration shortly if we’re unable to secure ZDR with OpenAI.
If this can be reviewed or escalated this coming week (March 23rd), I would greatly appreciate it.