Penn began piloting its artificial intelligence portal last week, featuring access to multiple large language models with an emphasis on data security. PennChat, which includes certain Claude and ChatGPT models, started rolling out to the University community on July 7, with the pilot expected to conclude in mid-August with the launch of an official AI service. According to Information Systems and Computing, PennChat is “hosted within Penn’s secure network environment” on Amazon Web Services “where companies cannot use Penn data to train AI models.” The service provides access to Anthropic models through Amazon Bedrock and to OpenAI models through Microsoft Foundry. For data protection, the interface’s LLMs cannot send queries to the internet and are only trained reliably on data collected before cutoff dates ranging from 2024 to 2025. Although PennChat is “cleared for use with Low, Moderate, and most High Risk data,” ISC clarified that users should not enter Social Security numbers or credit card numbers. Users must be connected to PennNet, AirPennNet, or the University’s GlobalProtect VPN to access the portal, where they can select from 14 different models sorted into three categories based on credit consumption. Each user is allotted a certain balance of credits refreshed daily if completely depleted; for at least some users, the balance is currently 1.85 million credits.