Retention Term Sheet

Retention Term Sheet treats data-retention language as a commercial constraint, not a legal footnote. Foundation model platforms differ on whether prompts and outputs are retained, for how long, and whether zero-retention or private deployment is available at a given tier. That single clause decides which client work an agency can route through a hosted API and which work must move to a private VPC or on-premises deployment. Cohere, for example, offers private VPC and on-premises deployment of Command, Embed, Rerank, Transcribe and Parse, which lets an agency accept a regulated client engagement that a shared-endpoint-only provider would block. The framework asks three questions before any build: what does the retention clause say, what does the client contract promise, and does the gap require a deployment change. Agencies that answer these at scoping time avoid rebuilding a delivery pipeline mid-retainer, and they can price the private-deployment premium into the original statement of work rather than absorbing it as margin loss.