OpenRouter, a service that routes requests to AI providers, defines zero data retention at the provider endpoint: prompts and responses are processed without being persistently stored there. Setting provider.zdr to true restricts routing to eligible endpoints. That setting does not govern every copy elsewhere in an application.
A consequential detail in its policy explainer concerns response caching. Account-level zero-retention enforcement disables that cache, but the per-request setting does not change cache eligibility. Application logs and external tools also have separate policies. A request can therefore satisfy the provider's retention rule while another part of the workflow stores its contents.
