ZDR on OpenRouter

OpenRouter’s ZDR guide defines Zero Data Retention as a provider policy: the endpoint does not store your data. When you turn ZDR on, OpenRouter will only send the request to endpoints that declare that policy. Providers that do not retain prompts also cannot train on them.

Where you turn it on

• Account privacy settings, including per model group for Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, xAI, and everyone else.
• A guardrail.
• One request, with provider.zdr set to true, or data_collection set to deny.

Those switches combine with OR. If the account, a guardrail, or the request demands ZDR, the request is restricted. A request cannot turn account-wide ZDR off.

{
  "model": "deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash",
  "messages": [{ "role": "user", "content": "Summarize this ticket." }],
  "provider": { "zdr": true }
}

ZDR is not the logging discount

By default OpenRouter says it does not log prompt and completion text, including on errors, unless you opt in. The opt-in is the setting that stores prompts in exchange for 1 percent off usage. ZDR is about the upstream provider. Turning on ZDR does not describe what you already allowed in that logging setting. Read both screens before you send customer data.

A model page with no ZDR endpoint will fail or fall back only inside the ZDR set. If every endpoint retains data, the call does not silently go to a retaining provider while zdr is true.