I think you're conflating real-time monitoring with data retention. Zero retention means OpenAI doesn't store user data, but they can absolutely still filter content, rate limit and block harmful prompts in real-time without retaining anything. That's processing requests as they come in, not storing them. The NYT case was about data storage for training/analysis not about real-time safety measures.

Ok you're off in the land of "what if" and I can just flat out say: If you have a ZDR account there is no filtering on inference, no real-time moderation, no blocking.

If you use their training infrastructure there's moderation on training examples, but SFT on non-harmful tasks still leads to a complete breakdown of guardrails very quickly.