University of Massachusetts Amherst: UMass Amherst built a secure AI chat tool — available to all students, faculty, and staff — that lets users chat with multiple AI models and build custom AI assistants for specific tasks. Users can access models from OpenAI, Anthropic (makers of Claude), Meta, Cohere, Mistral, and DeepSeek, all through a single university-managed interface. The platform launched in September 2025. | AI Trace
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UMass Amherst built a secure AI chat tool — available to all students, faculty, and staff — that lets users chat with multiple AI models and build custom AI assistants for specific tasks. Users can access models from OpenAI, Anthropic (makers of Claude), Meta, Cohere, Mistral, and DeepSeek, all through a single university-managed interface. The platform launched in September 2025.
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Built on the open-source LibreChat framework, the platform includes an Agent Builder so faculty and administrators can create purpose-specific AI tools — for example, a course assistant for a particular class or a departmental chatbot for advising. Unlike using commercial AI tools directly, the university-hosted version keeps data within UMass's own computing infrastructure and is approved for non-public institutional data. UMass has released the underlying system as the open-source campusGenAI project so that other universities can adopt the same approach.
