Data Retention
Data retention decides how long ANTS Platform keeps the data your organization sends and collects. You set one period for the whole organization. Every project follows it. A nightly job permanently deletes data older than the period.
Open Organization Settings → Data Retention. Viewing the page needs tenantSecurity.dataRetention:read and changing the period needs tenantSecurity.dataRetention:admin. Among the built-in roles, Owner and Security & Compliance hold both. Saving a period also needs the data-retention entitlement (Enterprise plan, cloud or self-hosted); without it the page is read-only and shows Upgrade your plan to configure a data retention period. See Members & Roles and Billing & Plans.
What the page shows
The table lists each category of data with three columns:
| Column | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Data type | The category. Hover it for a description. |
| Kept for | How long the data is kept, read live from the systems that enforce it. |
| Set by | Where the period comes from: Your organization, Platform default, Project setting, Not set, Not configurable or Unknown. |
When several stores make up one category, Kept for shows the longest of them. Prompt and response payloads in object storage can also have a platform lifecycle rule (90 days on ANTS Platform cloud), and they are deleted at whichever comes first. Unknown means the period could not be read.
| Category | What it covers |
|---|---|
| LLM traces & observability | Traces, observations, scores and dataset run items. |
| Session metadata | The records that group traces into sessions. A session is deleted once every trace in it is past the period. |
| Prompt & response content | The raw prompt and response payloads, kept as files in object storage. |
| Attachments & file records | Media files attached to traces and the records that point to them. |
| Discover AI usage activity | Browser activity, desktop app sessions, command-line sessions, file transfers, network flows, MCP server activity and prompt parser sessions from the Discover AI agents. |
| Guardrail decisions | The record of each guardrail check and its result. |
| Administrative audit trail | Audit log entries. These are not deleted by the retention setting. |
| Device & agent telemetry | Check-ins from the agents installed on devices. No user content. |
Change the retention period
Pick a period
Under Keep data for, choose 30 days, 90 days, 6 months, 1 year, 2 years, 7 years or Indefinite. These are the only options.
Save
Select Save. The hint under the field shows the current and the new value.
Confirm
A dialog asks you to confirm. If the new period is shorter than the current one, the dialog is titled Shorten data retention? and you must select Shorten retention.
The new period takes effect at the next scheduled purge. The page shows the time.
Shortening retention permanently deletes all data older than the new period at the next purge. There is no grace period and no undo. Export anything you need to keep first. See Data Exports.
How the purge works
- The purge runs every night at 03:15 UTC.
- For every project in the organization it deletes, older than the period: traces, observations, scores, dataset run items, Discover AI activity and device check-ins, the stored prompt and response payloads, attached media files, and expired session records.
- Audit log entries, guardrail decisions (which follow their own period, shown in the table) and notifications are not deleted by this job.
- Indefinite means the organization setting deletes nothing.
- Deleted projects are removed in full by project deletion, whatever the retention setting.
- Every change to the period is recorded in Audit Logs as
organization.data_retention_changed, with the old and new values.
Project retention
Projects do not have their own retention control in the UI. Project Settings → General shows the organization period as read-only, with a link to Organization Settings.
When the organization period has never been set, a project can still carry its own period, set when it was created or updated through the organization Admin API (retention, either 0 or at least 3 days; a value above 0 needs the data-retention entitlement). In that case the table shows Varies by project. Once the organization period is set, it applies to every project.
Next steps
- Data Privacy: hide prompt and response content.
- Data Exports: keep a copy in your own storage.
- Audit Logs: review who changed retention.