Zero Data Retention: Keep the Proof, Not the Data

There is an uncomfortable trade-off buried in most audit tooling: the more thoroughly you log what your systems did, the more sensitive data you end up storing.

For AI agents this gets sharp fast. Agents handle the material you care most about, customer records, contract text, patient notes, transaction details. If your audit layer captures what the agent was working on, then a system you bought to reduce risk has quietly become another copy of your crown jewels, in another vendor's database, inside another blast radius.

Security teams notice this immediately. It is usually the question that stalls the deal: "So you're going to store our data too?"

Our answer is now a setting you can switch on.

Proof and content are different things

The key insight is that proving what happened does not require keeping what was in it.

To demonstrate that a specific agent took a specific action at a specific time, and that the record has not been altered since, you need the agent's identity, the action, the result, a timestamp, a cryptographic hash of the inputs and outputs, a signature, and the chain link to the previous event. You do not need the actual contents of the contract it read.

A hash is enough. If someone later disputes what the agent was given, you hash the document they produce and compare. Match means it is the same input. No match means it is not. The proof holds either way, and Vorim never had to hold the document.

What zero data retention does

Turn it on for your organization and the free-form content channels are dropped before anything is written to storage:

What is always kept, because it is the product and stripping it would defeat the purpose:

So the ledger still answers the questions it exists to answer, which agent acted, when, under what authority, and with what outcome, and an auditor can still verify the chain has not been tampered with. It just no longer holds the content your agents were working on.

Two details that matter

It happens before persistence, not after. This is not a deletion job that sweeps up later, leaving a window where the data sat on disk. The fields are dropped on the ingest path, so the content is never written in the first place.

Signatures still verify. Stripping runs after signature verification, so an event is still checked against exactly what your SDK signed. We drop the field from storage; we never alter what we verified. One related consequence: the resource field is deliberately not stripped, because it is a short identifier like a tool name and it is covered by the signature. Removing it would make your exported bundles fail verification, which would be a strange way to protect you.

Turning it on

It is a single toggle in the dashboard, under Runtime, then Settings, in the Data retention section. It is also available over the API for teams that manage configuration as code:

PATCH /v1/runtime/settings
{ "zero_data_retention": true }

It is off by default, because turning it on silently would change what existing customers' audit trails contain without them asking. And it applies to new events from the moment you enable it; it does not retroactively remove content already stored.

Why we built it this way

We could have made "we don't store your data" a line on the pricing page and left it vague. Plenty of vendors do.

The problem with a vague claim is that the people who care about it most, security reviewers and compliance teams, are exactly the people who will ask what it means precisely. So it is a real setting, with a defined scope, enforced in the ingest path, and covered by tests that assert the content is absent from the database when it is on and present when it is off, so the guarantee cannot quietly rot.

Minimizing what you hold is the oldest idea in data protection. It applies just as well to the system doing the watching.

Zero data retention is available now on all plans, including the free tier. Minimizing what a vendor stores about you should not be something you have to pay for. Start at vorim.ai, or reach us at team@vorim.ai.

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