Comment by gonzalohm

4 days ago

I don't understand how the data retention works. My company has an enterprise license with no data retention but if I ask Claude about past conversations, it remembers. So surely the information is being stored somewhere

14 comments

gonzalohm

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NiloCK  4 days ago

Opus 4.7+ and Fable are both much more aggressive than prior models with respect to writing memories to a location that's effectively quasi-private for them. It's device-local (so passes retention constraint), and you can see it, but only if you go looking for it.

It's a funny design/affordance. I do see them often writing memories of things that that feel unlikely to be important going foward / with other tasks, but I don't see them clearly getting tripped up by them as prior models used to. (eg: Since you're running Ubuntu in Canada, here are some drills you can try to help your kid hit a baseball more consistently.)

  • bandrami  3 days ago

    Another silent inflation of token count. There's no force on earth that can overcome that incentive for the labs.

    • NiloCK  2 days ago

      Of course there is: competition with other labs, and self-hosting of open-weight models!

      Yes, the mechanics are straightforward if Anthropic (or Claude, if you want to ascribe the decision there) decides to burn a pile of your money. But the strategy fails basic game-theory of repeated games - you'll simply stop playing.

      (this isn't to say it invalidates the incentive to inflate token count, but it overcomes in terms of weighing options and making long-term profit decisions.)

      1 reply →

persedes  4 days ago

You most likely are referring to the local jsonl files where claude has your sessions etc stored.

  • mh-  4 days ago

    It could just be the memory features.

    In my enterprise-seated account I see slightly different options available (vs. my personal account) in the Capabilities section:

      Search and reference chats
  Allow Claude to search for relevant details in past chats.

  Generate memory from chat history (Legacy)
  Allow Claude to remember relevant context from your chats. Memory includes your entire chat history with Claude.

    The first option was defaulted to on, if I recall.

    • gonzalohm  4 days ago

      But it kind of conflicts with the contract we have with them. My company has an enterprise contract that says "no data retention" but then each user can decide to enable it unilateral?

      3 replies →

bathtub365  4 days ago

Likely in memory files stored locally

  • gonzalohm  4 days ago

    I'm talking about the website. It's not local because I can see my chats in any device

    • usef-  3 days ago

      Yes, all chat interfaces store the history as it's part of the UI promise (unless you open an incognito chat) and is fully server side.

      When people talk about retention they mean API usage and terminal agents, which run on your device.