Anthropic is replacing a controversial data retention policy after pushback from enterprise customers

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The company says its new Enterprise Frontier Safeguards system lets businesses store and control their own data while Anthropic runs automated safety monitoring

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Anthropic announced Enterprise Frontier Safeguards on Tuesday, a system designed to replace a data retention policy that drew complaints from business customers, particularly those in regulated industries.

The new system allows enterprise customers to store data in their own cloud infrastructure — including Amazon $AMZN S3, Azure Blob Storage, or Google $GOOGL Cloud Storage — under their own encryption keys and access policies. Automated safety monitoring still scans for potential misuse, but no human review by Anthropic employees is required, the company said. Anthropic said it will not charge for Enterprise Frontier Safeguards.

The 30-day data retention requirement Anthropic put in place in June was tied to the rollout of Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5, with the company arguing it needed the data to catch sophisticated cyberattacks that can play out across multiple sessions and accounts. The company said at the time that it would not use retained data for model training. Many enterprise customers, however, raised objections, particularly those operating under strict regulatory requirements governing who may access sensitive information.

According to CNBC, Kate Jensen, who leads Anthropic's Americas operations, said the company invested hundreds of hours in customer collaboration to arrive at the new solution. "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," Jensen said.

Anthropic said it developed Enterprise Frontier Safeguards in collaboration with more than 100 customers across financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, telecom, law, retail, and the public sector. The company worked with the Analysis and Resilience Center for Systemic Risk, whose members include the chief information security officers of Goldman Sachs $GS, Morgan Stanley $MS, Citi, Bank of America $BAC, and Wells Fargo $WFC, as well as leaders at companies including Comcast $CMCSA, KPMG, Mastercard $MA, Salesforce $CRM, Stripe, and Visa $V.

Enterprise Frontier Safeguards will be supported on Claude Code, Claude Enterprise, the Claude Platform, Amazon Bedrock, Claude Platform on AWS, Google's Agent Platform, and Microsoft $MSFT Foundry. The system will roll out to customers in phases, with broader availability targeted for later this fall. Customers eligible for the new system will receive zero data retention on Fable 5 and Fable 5.1 during the transition period, the company said. Anthropic also launched two new models on Tuesday, Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1.

The move follows OpenAI's introduction of its own safety monitoring system that does not require holding customer data. Consumers and other non-enterprise subscribers who use Mythos-class models are not covered by the new system and remain subject to the original June policy, according to CNBC.

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