Deployment
Use the AI provider your institution can approve
Bring-your-own-key keeps the provider account, billing relationship, and model approval path with your lab or institution. Researcher Center provides the private knowledge layer around it.
Source-grounded answersWorkspace boundariesDeployment choice
Who reviews this page
Labs, departments, and research centers with an existing approved AI provider account or procurement path.
What stays with you
- The provider account, invoices, rate limits, model choices, and key lifecycle remain under your control.
- Provider secrets are handled server-side and are never exposed to browser-facing code.
- Usage is visible for governance, while your provider relationship remains direct.
What Researcher Center adds
- Workspace access control, ingestion, retrieval, citations, refusal behavior, and audit-aware operations.
- A consistent user experience for the lab, regardless of which approved provider powers inference.
- A clean path to move between managed, BYO-key, and local modes as requirements change.
Controls to review
- Provider settings do not reveal keys, credentialed URLs, prompts, answers, or document text.
- Workspace permissions still gate every answer, regardless of whose key powers it.
- Provider outages, rate limits, and failures should surface as clear product states.
- Key rotation and revocation should be treated as standard operational hygiene.
Before uploading sensitive documents, review the known limitations and confirm which AI operating model your lab can approve.
Start with a corpus your lab already trusts
A focused pilot is the cleanest way to evaluate citations, refusal behavior, access boundaries, and deployment fit.