How long should I keep records of AI agent work?
A handover brings the recorded AI work and its verifiable receipts into one proof link. Review the evidence behind each claim, check what was and was not observed, then Accept or Flag.
Scope: general information for setting a retention schedule, not legal advice. Binding periods come from your contracts, your tax authority, and your sector's rules.
Retention questions get vague answers because "the records" are treated as one pile. Split the pile into classes and each class has an obvious clock. Delivery records (handovers, receipts, acceptance decisions) live as long as the client relationship's tail: the contract's own retention or claims period is the floor, and most client work argues for keeping them for the life of the relationship plus the period in which a dispute could still be raised.
Financial records follow the tax clock of your jurisdiction, which is measured in years, not months, and the job index that ties invoices to work should be kept on the same clock. Operational records (spend, access, incident files) follow your internal risk horizon: long enough to answer an insurer's or an auditor's look-back, which the EU AI Act's log provisions put at a six-month floor in the cases they name, and which prudent teams round up to a full operating cycle.
Two rules keep the schedule honest. Keep the export, not just the platform's copy: a retention promise you cannot execute after cancelling a tool is not a schedule, it is a hope. And set deletion dates as deliberately as retention dates; a record kept forever by default is its own risk, and a written schedule with both edges is what reviewers ask to see.
Schedule: retention by record class
Delivery records (handovers, receipts, acceptances): contract period plus the dispute window; default 3 years after final delivery if the contract is silent. Financial trail (invoices, job index, expense records): your jurisdiction's tax record period. Approvals and incident records: 3 years, or the client's audit cycle if longer. Spend and access records: 1 year minimum; 6 months is the EU AI Act floor where its log rules apply, not a target. Working chats and drafts: 90 days after delivery, then the record classes above carry the history. Review the schedule annually; export everything on the same cadence.
Worked example
The delivery class in durable form: a handover such as https://zambo.dev/handover/45434a17-4afc-486a-9646-e689bcee4297 stays openable and checkable after the job ends, and its export keeps the same record in your own storage. Retention you can execute looks like that: a link that still resolves, and a copy you hold.
Frequently asked questions
Is longer always safer?
No. Over-retention has its own costs: client data held past its purpose, discovery surface in disputes, and storage nobody curates. The schedule's virtue is that each period is chosen against an obligation, with a deletion date, rather than set to forever by neglect.
What if a client contract and the tax period disagree?
Keep the longer of the obligations that apply to that record class, and note both in the schedule. Conflicts almost always resolve to the longer period; the schedule exists so the resolution is written before anyone asks.
Do receipts themselves expire on Zambo?
Records you made stay checkable; the retention decision is yours, executed through your exports and your schedule. The discipline this page asks for is the written schedule, reviewed annually, not any platform default.
By Brennan Zambo, founder of Zambo.
Last verified: 2026-10-17.
Try a handover
A handover gives your client one proof link with verifiable receipts to review, then Accept or Flag.
try it: say 'use zambo to hand this over to <client>' in your ai