Clarity Platform

What is Clarity

Clarity is Yale’s secure, scalable AI platform that provides Yale faculty, students, and staff access to a range of AI models - including GPT, Claude, and others - to support their work and research. Developed in response to the Yale Task Force on Artificial Intelligence, Clarity provides equitable access to a generative AI tool while keeping individual and university data private which also means that conversations are never used to train AI models.

  • Secure Connections: Instead of connecting to AI services directly (which can be less secure), Clarity uses private, encrypted connections with proper security credentials. It’s like having a private, guarded tunnel instead of using a public road.  
  • Detailed Permission System: While the entire University community has access to chat with agents in Clarity, special access must be granted to create or chat with Custom Agents or utilize API keys 
  • Choice of AI Models: Users can choose different AI models for different tasks such as creating or reviewing code vs. summarizing documents or analyzing data. 
  • Intuitive Data Integration: Clarity can use information from files you upload to give the agent context for more accurate answers. Clarity also employs advanced techniques that are faster and more cost-effective than basic methods. 
  • Custom Agent Creation: Users with approved use cases can create their own Custom Agent in Clarity, controlling the system prompts, knowledge sources, and user access. 
  • API keys: Users with approved use cases can request API keys to their Custom Agents for use in applications outside of Clarity. 
  • Consistent Experience: Clarity provides a single interface, so users get a consistent experience regardless of which AI model they’re using. 
  • Built for Scale: Clarity can handle thousands of users across the entire University without slowing down. 
  • Accessible Design: Our websites follow accessibility guidelines (WCAG 2.1 AA), so they work well for users with disabilities. 
  • Robust Infrastructure: Clarity runs on Yale’s secure cloud systems, which manage everything from user logins to running code safely and managing connections to AI services. 
clarity.yale.edu

Security

Clarity is appropriate for use with low, moderate, and most high-risk data, with restriction of Electronic Protected Health Information (ePHI) to only specified agents for the Health Science community. Users with external obligations like data use agreements should also make sure their use of Clarity is appropriate. For further details, see Clarity Platform Security and Health Sciences AI Toolkit for ePHI information.

Resources

The following resources help you get started with and learn more about the Clarity platform.

Accessing Clarity

  1. Go to the Clarity Platform on any browser. 
  2. Current Yale staff, students, and faculty with a Yale email can access and interact with any of the agents that appear in your Agent dropdown in Clarity at no cost.
  3. Once logged in, you can begin interacting with the platform by entering your message into the chat window at the bottom of the screen.

Introduction to the Clarity Platform

Demo of Clarity AI Chatbot

How Do I Get Support?

​If you are experiencing an issue with your use of the Clarity platform that is not addressed by the content on this website, please reach out in the following ways.  

Roadmap

For more information about our future enhancements and platform capabilities, please see Clarity platform’s Roadmap.

Comparing Clarity and Copilot Chat

Attributes Copilot Chat (formerly Copilot with Data Protection) Clarity Platform
Large Language Model  Various models including OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 OpenAI’s GPT-5.2, GPT-5 mini, o3, Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.6, and Google’s Gemini Pro 2.5 and Flash 2.5

(see a comparison of Clarity agents using the different models)
Able to search the web and provide links and citations in its response generation  ✓   
File upload  ✓ 
 		 ✓ 
 
File upload limits Unlimited text file uploads with a maximum size of 1MB per file. Limited to 1 image file per prompt.  No limit on number of file uploads and can upload up to 10 files simultaneously. There is a  maximum file size of 512MB per file.  In addition, the size of the extracted text (not the size of the original file) cannot exceed 10,000,000 characters. 
File upload from OneDrive ✓  ✓ 
Image generation ✓  Temporarily unavailable
Chat limits No limits No limits 
Chat history Chats are saved for 18 months and can be accessed in the chat history panel  Chats are saved and can be accessed in the chat history panel. Chats that have had no activity after 6 months will be automatically deleted
Costs Free  Free 
Availability Staff, faculty, and students (18 years of age or above) Staff, faculty, and students 
Data risk classification  High risk data in Work tab, 
moderate risk data in Web tab		 High risk data, with some restrictions such as ePHI. Refer to Clarity Platform Security and Health Sciences AI Toolkit for more information
Vendor  Microsoft  The Clarity Platform is built on FoundationaLLM