Conversations are kept indefinitely while your account is active. Deleted chats are purged within 30 days. Temporary chats are held up to 30 days for safety review. API inputs and outputs are retained for around 30 days unless zero retention is agreed. Legal holds override all of these.
Short answer
Conversations are kept indefinitely while your account is active. Deleted chats are purged within 30 days. Temporary chats are held up to 30 days for safety review. API inputs and outputs are retained for around 30 days unless zero retention is agreed. Legal holds override all of these.
Retention is the question behind most AI privacy concerns, and the answer depends entirely on which of five buckets your data falls into.
The periods
| Data | Retention |
|---|---|
| Active conversations | Indefinite, while the account exists |
| Conversations you delete | Purged within 30 days |
| Temporary chats | Up to 30 days for abuse review |
| Saved memories | Until you delete them individually |
| API requests | Around 30 days, or zero with an agreement |
| Deleted account | Purged, subject to legal and billing requirements |
Indefinite means indefinite
There is no automatic expiry on a normal conversation. A chat from your first week on the platform is still there. Nothing prunes it, and no setting introduces a rolling deletion window. Retention on a consumer account is entirely manual: what you delete goes, what you do not delete stays.
The 30 day figure
Thirty days appears in several places and it is the same underlying idea each time. It is a grace window during which the provider can investigate abuse, satisfy a support request, or recover from an operational error before data is permanently destroyed. During that window the content is out of your reach but not yet gone.
What overrides retention policy
Litigation. When a provider is subject to a preservation order it must retain data it would otherwise delete, and that can include conversations users have already removed. This has happened in practice in the AI sector. It is not a scandal so much as how discovery works for every cloud service, but it does mean a stated deletion period is a default rather than a promise.
Safety flags are the other override. Content flagged by classifiers can be retained longer for review.
Practical consequences
If your reason for caring about retention is regulatory, get the answer from your plan's data processing agreement rather than the help centre. Enterprise agreements can specify custom retention, and API zero data retention is available for qualifying use cases.
If your reason is personal, the useful move is inverting the problem. Rather than trying to control how long OpenAI keeps a conversation, keep your own copy and delete theirs early. Export from Settings, Data Controls, convert conversations.json into PDF or Markdown files stored locally, then clear your history. Your retention period becomes the one you choose, on storage you control, and the 30 day question stops being interesting.
Frequently asked questions
Does OpenAI keep chats after I close my account?
Account deletion triggers purging of associated conversations, though billing records and legally required data are retained separately.
Can I set a custom retention period on a personal account?
No. Custom retention is an Enterprise and API level control. Consumer accounts have manual deletion only.
How long do shared links last?
Indefinitely, until you delete them from Settings, Data Controls, Shared links. They do not expire on their own.
Are backups included in the 30 day purge?
OpenAI states deleted content is removed from its systems within 30 days, which covers backup rotation in normal circumstances.