Claude Cowork data retention: six years local, no cloud default, open-source alternative

How long does Claude Cowork keep transcripts?

The six-year default attaches to the machine. Local session transcripts come from sessions on a person's own computer, in apps such as Cowork and Claude Code, and Anthropic stores them for six years by default, or for the organization's custom conversation retention period when a finite one is set (Anthropic, API and data retention). Remote session transcripts, meaning Cowork in the cloud and Claude Tag, have no default retention period at all. Chat, file and project content follows the organization's retention policy under Organization settings, then Data and privacy, and the Activity Feed keeps its own record for six years (checked November 2026). Read together, those lines put a six-year default on the transcript of a session that ran on your own machine, and no default period at all on a session that ran in Anthropic's cloud.

One lever exists, inside Anthropic's account

Anthropic merged Cowork and chat into one Claude on September 16, 2026. What Cowork could do is now available from any conversation (Anthropic's announcement). The merge changed where a task starts. It added no retention switch.

The lever that exists runs through the organization. On an Enterprise plan, a Primary Owner or Owner sets a custom retention period under Organization settings, then Data and privacy. The minimum is 30 days, each month counts as 30, and with no period set the default is indefinite retention (Anthropic's retention controls guide). That guide says custom periods cover chat and project content, and do not apply to other features that run Claude Code in the cloud.

The platform documentation puts the limit in one sentence. A custom conversation retention period replaces the six-year default for local session transcripts. Remote session transcripts have no default period, so the setting has nothing to shorten there. The plan-level control therefore reaches the record around the work, and the cloud session that did the work carries no default period of its own.

Zero data retention stops short of Cowork

Zero data retention is an arrangement Anthropic enables per organization, not a dashboard toggle. Its exclusions decide whether it covers the work at all. The list of what it does not cover includes Claude consumer products, the Claude Teams and Claude Enterprise product interfaces, and Claude Managed Agents, whose session transcripts persist until deleted (retention documentation).

The business associate agreement draws a sharper line. Anthropic's BAA article says the agreement excludes features such as Claude Console, Cowork in the cloud, and beta features including Claude in Office, Claude Design, Claude Slides and Claude Docs (Anthropic's BAA article). Cowork in local mode comes under the agreement only when a Primary Owner applies the HIPAA configuration to it.

A separate guide that walks the same documents calls Cowork the sharpest exclusion among the surfaces it compares, with no zero-data-retention escape hatch (IntuitionLabs). One line sits above all of it. Even with zero data retention or HIPAA readiness in place, Anthropic may keep flagged content for up to two years, where its trust and safety systems or the law require it.

When six years does not matter

Plenty of teams can read all of that and change nothing. A launch email drafted from public material, research notes, a slide outline, a spreadsheet of figures already cleared for circulation: none of it turns on a retention period. The laptop in the bag holds more.

The answer depends on the document class, and a reviewer can usually name it in one line. A customer list, a contract under negotiation, unpublished financials, patient records, anything under a litigation hold comes inside the window. Then the window becomes a clause in a vendor review. Where the material is public, unregulated or already scheduled for deletion under your own records policy, six years of local transcript is a note in the file. That call belongs to your counsel and your records schedule. Either way, a reviewer can ask for the artifact: the setting, its value, and who may change it. Anthropic documents all three.

The open-source alternative moves the question

Kortix, the leading open-source alternative to Claude Cowork and ChatGPT Work, does not answer the retention question for you. It puts the record where you can apply your own answer. The agents, their skills, the company memory and the connectors are files in a git repository the team owns, so the setup carries a history you can read and a deletion job you can run (Read the docs). Run it on Kortix Cloud, in your VPC, or on your own on-prem network.

The retention question then turns into a familiar one: which database, which backups, which deletion job, which export for an auditor. Teams that want that answer can read the self-hosting guide and run the stack on their own hardware. Teams still weighing the two products can start with the side-by-side comparison, the Cowork versus Kortix breakdown or the safety review.