Anthropic’s head of safeguards, Dave Orr, acknowledged a gap in investigations of customer activity before Australia’s parliament on October 6. Services that do not retain data leave the company unable to review past model interactions.
Orr said Anthropic had examined hundreds of millions of internal transcripts for unauthorized interactions with Australian government agencies and found no such cases. Most of that review was AI-assisted.
That finding does not provide the same visibility into customer activity. Historically, a large share of customers used zero data retention, Orr said. Without saved interactions, Anthropic lacks the material needed for a retrospective investigation.
The company is working to retain more data for those investigations. Orr did not announce an end to every zero-data-retention offering. His account limits the reach of the reported negative finding: reviewed internal activity and unobservable customer use are different bodies of evidence.