Researchers

Research data — especially in medical, social science, or proprietary commercial research — often comes with constraints on where it can be processed and who can access it. Cloud AI services receive and process data submitted to them; the data handling implications of that are worth thinking through carefully before submitting research data to a third-party AI.

Local AI processes your data without transmission to third parties. Whether this satisfies your specific IRB protocol, data sharing agreement, or NDA is a determination for your institution's IRB and legal counsel — we configure tools for privacy, not for compliance certification.

AnythingLLM is particularly useful for research: upload your literature corpus, interview transcripts, or dataset documentation and ask questions about them. The AI answers from your documents. Nothing is uploaded to an external service.

For unpublished findings, the argument is straightforward: your results have value before publication precisely because they aren't public. Processing them through cloud AI introduces exposure that local AI avoids entirely.