Use ChatGPT Team without having your data retained forever
OpenAI confirms something I've suspected for a while.
When ChatGPT Team released (renamed ChatGPT Business on August 29, 2025), one of my clients (wisely) asked about its security. I signed up myself and here’s what I found.
Model training
This is off by default (and cannot be turned on by anyone, including admins). From a security perspective this is an improvement from the consumer version, where training is on by default (but you can opt-out).
Indemnification
Reminder: I am not an attorney and this is not legal advice.
ChatGPT Business also brings customers under OpenAI’s business terms of service, which include IP indemnification provisions whereby OpenAI will defend customers against certain third-party intellectual property claims arising from use of its products.
Enterprise controls
The Business plan now includes SAML SSO and admin retention controls - you only need to upgrade to Enterprise for features like data residency, SCIM provisioning, enterprise key management, and 24/7 priority support with SLAs., which brings me to the final topic:
Data retention
This kind of blew my mind, because OpenAI appears to be saying the quiet part out loud here.
Their Privacy Policy has the typical legalese regarding data retention:
We’ll retain your Personal Information for only as long as we need in order to provide our Service to you, or for other legitimate business purposes such as resolving disputes, safety and security reasons, or complying with our legal obligations. How long we retain Personal Information will depend on a number of factors, such as the amount, nature, and sensitivity of the information, the potential risk of harm from unauthorized use or disclosure, our purpose for processing the information, and any legal requirements.
This is understandably vague and I have long advised to treat this is as basically meaning “forever,” even though that’s not exactly what it says.
f you look at the chat retention option in ChatGPT Business, it is set to indefinite by default. Admins can configure custom retention windows, but only in 30-day increments, and with a 90-day floor.
So while there is now some control, you cannot set retention below 90 days, and inaction means indefinite retention.
Thus it seems that OpenAI marketing and product management are saying something different than legal via the Privacy Policy. And chats are “Personal Information” according to that document:
When you use our Services, we collect Personal Information that is included in the input, file uploads, or feedback that you provide to our Services (“Content”).
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen some disconnect between different parts of the organization when it comes to security. I understand that things can be disjointed when you are moving fast but this is a little concerning.
Potential workarounds
Get ChatGPT Enterprise
Whether this counts as a workaround is debatable, but if you sign up for Enterprise, administrators have control over data retention:
I’ll note that several of my clients have had difficulty even getting OpenAI on the phone to discuss buying Enterprise. Since it isn’t available in a self-service manner, this may hold you back. Additionally, I have heard from multiple sources that OpenAI is quoting potential buyers at $60/month/user with a minimum of 150 users and a 12-month commitment. $108,000/year for a single software product is out of reach for many businesses.
Use temporary chats
OpenAI has killed off the disable chat history feature, but replaced it with Temporary Chats. This means conversations are only retained for 30 days when in use, but it requires manually turning them on and cannot be enforced throughout the organization:
Manually delete all (sensitive) conversations
If you still want to use custom GPTs, then you may be able to just manually delete conversations when you are done with them.
OpenAI’s Chat and File Retention Policies states:
“When you delete a chat (or your account), the chat is removed from your account immediately and scheduled for permanent deletion from OpenAI systems within 30 days, unless we are legally required to retain them.
Similarly to turning off conversation history, this requires manual employee action so I wouldn’t count on it to be airtight.
Use the Playground
If you need to use custom GPTs, you might consider building them using the Responses API instead, which follows the API terms of service and enterprise privacy conditions. API inputs and outputs are retained for a maximum of 30 days - and potentially zero if your organization qualifies for zero data retention (ZDR) - barring a legal hold.
Another downside here is that anyone at your organization with access to the API can see your conversations (see this post for an explanation of how Threads and Assistants work). After doing some sleuthing and checking this forum discussion, it looks like the risk here would be minimal, though, because one needs to know the Thread ID in order to request its contents.
But if you have strict internal compartmentation requirements, this won’t work.
Additionally, you are not able to save your chat history like you can with the user interface. But this forced deletion (as opposed to the default preservation of the approaches described above) will be more secure.
Finally, it will shift from a seat-based subscription to a per-token model - a meaningful change in cost structure depending on your usage patterns.
Balancing risk and reward with AI
If this all seems complex…it is.
Decisions about whether to tolerate infinite data retention in order to leverage certain features can be difficult. And will eventually come down to your risk appetite.
But if you need some help in making sense of the AI landscape when it comes to:
Cybersecurity
Compliance
Privacy
I can help.
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