How long does Claude keep client data?

Start with the default. On Team and Enterprise, a conversation stays in the workspace so the person who had it can see their history. When someone deletes a chat, Anthropic removes it from its back end within 30 days. Enterprise owners can go further and set one retention period for the whole organization, as short as 30 days.

Four exceptions run longer, and each deserves a line in your policy:

• Flagged chats. If Anthropic's automated safety systems flag a chat as violating its Usage Policy, Anthropic says it keeps the inputs and outputs for up to 2 years and the classification scores for up to 7.
• Feedback. A thumbs-up or thumbs-down stores the entire conversation for up to 5 years. Owners can switch chat ratings off in Organization settings, Data and Privacy, and an RIA should.
• The law. Anthropic may keep chats or sessions as the law requires or to combat Usage Policy violations.
• Cowork on the laptop. Anthropic's Cowork admin guide says: "For local sessions, Cowork stores conversation history on users' computers. This data is not subject to Anthropic's standard data retention policies, and admins cannot centrally manage or delete it."

Covered models add one more rule. For the models Anthropic calls covered (Fable 5 and 5.1, Mythos 5 and 5.1), it keeps prompts and outputs for 30 days for safety work on every platform where they are offered, including Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud. Other models, such as Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5, are not affected.

Connector data follows the conversation. When a skill pulls a household's positions from Orion or notes from Wealthbox, the record stays in that system. What comes back enters the Claude conversation and lives under the same rules as everything else in it.

Then the part most firms get backwards. Anthropic deleting a chat does nothing for your recordkeeping. Rule 204-2 requires an adviser to keep required records for five years, the first two in an appropriate office. If a Claude output becomes a client communication or a record you must keep, it belongs in your archive.

On Enterprise, the Compliance API can feed an archive such as Smarsh. For Cowork, Anthropic says it returns sessions from the most recent 30 days, so the archive has to pull continuously. On Team there is no Compliance API, so capture happens by procedure: the advisor saves the final output to the archive. That works, and it is weaker, because it depends on people remembering.