Vercel Adds Team-Wide Zero Data Retention Controls to AI Gateway

In an April 8 X post, Vercel announced that AI Gateway now supports team-wide Zero Data Retention, or ZDR. The linked product post argues that multi-model applications create a policy-management mess because providers expose different retention terms, opt-out behavior, and compliance defaults. Vercel’s answer is to move that logic into the gateway so teams no longer need to negotiate or enforce policy one provider at a time.

According to Vercel, team-wide ZDR is available for Pro and Enterprise teams and applies to every request without code changes. The company says AI Gateway will route only to providers where it has negotiated ZDR agreements, and it specifically names OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google among the providers with ZDR-capable options. The same release adds request-level ZDR, explicit disallowPromptTraining controls, and response metadata that shows which candidate providers were filtered out during routing.

That combination matters because AI platform teams are increasingly judged on compliance posture as much as latency or model quality. By turning retention and training controls into infrastructure policy, Vercel is trying to make model selection behave more like traffic routing than application-specific security code. It is also a sign that the multi-model layer is evolving from a simple failover shim into a governance layer that can explain why a prompt was allowed to touch one provider and blocked from another.