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Thread retention is an Enterprise feature, enabled per organization on request — contact us to turn it on. Self-hosted Enterprise deployments set LIGHTDASH_ENABLE_FEATURE_FLAGS=ai-thread-retention — see feature flag environment variables.
By default, Lightdash keeps AI agent threads forever. Organizations with compliance or privacy requirements can set a retention window instead: threads with no activity for the configured period are automatically and permanently deleted, once per hour. Retention only applies to threads, never to your warehouse data, which stays in your warehouse under your own policies.

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How retention works

Retention is configured in whole hours (presets from 1 hour to 90 days, or a custom value), at two levels:
  • Organization default — applies to every agent in the organization, including threads that aren’t linked to an agent.
  • Per-agent window — an agent can set a shorter window than the organization default, making the organization value the ceiling.
The clock is based on inactivity: a thread expires only when it has had no new messages for the whole window, measured from its latest activity.

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What gets deleted

When a thread expires, everything derived from it is deleted with it:
  • prompts, responses, tool calls and tool results, and reasoning
  • share links (revoked)
  • agent memories learned from the thread
  • evaluation prompts that reference the thread (evaluation suites may shrink), and past evaluation runs’ threads
Content created from threads, like saved charts and dashboards, is stored independently and is not affected. Deletion is permanent. When an admin lowers the organization window, Lightdash shows how many threads across how many agents will be deleted before the change is confirmed.

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What retention does not cover

The retention window applies to AI agent thread content stored by Lightdash. Adjacent stores keep their own, separately bounded retention:

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Configuring retention

Organization default: go to Organization settings → Ask AI → General → Thread retention. Lowering the window (or setting one where there was none) asks for confirmation and shows how many existing threads will be deleted.
Conversation retention setting in the organization Ask AI settings
Per-agent window: in the agent’s settings under Permissions → Thread retention. When an organization default exists, it caps the values you can pick, and leaving the agent setting empty inherits the organization default.
Conversation retention setting in the agent's Permissions section

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Agents as code

Agents managed as code can set the per-agent window with the optional threadRetentionHours field:
  • a number sets the window (validated against the organization ceiling)
  • an explicit null clears the agent’s window, inheriting the organization default
  • omitting the field leaves the stored setting unchanged
Uploads into an organization where retention is not enabled ignore the field and return a warning instead of failing, so agent configuration stays portable across organizations.