Anthropic lets businesses keep AI data on their own servers after privacy backlash

Anthropic on Tuesday announced Enterprise Frontier Safeguards, a new privacy framework that lets enterprise customers store activity data in their own cloud infrastructure rather than on Anthropic's systems, marking a reversal of a controversial data retention policy that had stalled adoption among regulated businesses.cnbc

The move, unveiled alongside the release of Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1, allows companies to keep logs in Amazon S3 Amazon.com, Inc. ↘ 0.35%, Azure Blob Storage Microsoft Corporation ↘ 0.99%, or Google Cloud Storage Alphabet Inc. ↗ 0.78% under their own encryption keys and access policies. Automated misuse-detection systems scan the data for threats, but no Anthropic employee reviews it. The company is not charging for the service.helpnetsecurity

A Policy Born From Pushback

Anthropic introduced 30-day data retention in June with the launch of Fable 5, arguing it needed to store prompts and outputs to detect sophisticated misuse patterns that span multiple sessions and accounts. The company pledged not to use the data for model training, but enterprise customers — particularly in banking, healthcare, and law — balked at the arrangement.cnbc

Kate Jensen, head of Americas at Anthropic, told CNBC the company spent hundreds of hours with customers developing an alternative. "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.cnbc

Designed With Wall Street

Anthropic said it worked with more than 100 customers on the design, including a quarter of the Fortune 100 and every U.S. global systemically important bank. Eight members of the Analysis and Resilience Center for Systemic Risk, a group whose roster includes the CISOs of Goldman Sachs ↘ 0.36%, Morgan Stanley ↘ 0.55%, Citi Citigroup Inc. ↗ 0.51%, Bank of America ↘ 0.68%, and Wells Fargo ↘ 1.01%, helped define the requirements.helpnetsecurity

"Enterprise Frontier Safeguards gives us exactly what we asked for: our logs stay in a Wells-managed environment under Wells-managed keys," said Munish Kumar Sharma, CISO at Wells Fargo.helpnetsecurity

Rollout and Competition

Support is planned for Claude Code, Claude Enterprise, Amazon Bedrock, Google's Agent Platform, and Microsoft Foundry, with broad availability targeted for later this fall. Eligible customers receive zero data retention on Fable 5 and Fable 5.1 until their rollout phase begins. The shift comes as rival OpenAI introduced its own data retention solution, called Private Safety Processing, last month. Consumer plans remain under Anthropic's previous retention policy.theregister+1