AI tools for students

On this page, you can find more information about AI tools for students.

Alternatives to ChatGPT

Most students are familiar with ChatGPT from the American company OpenAI. In addition, there are of course other AI tools that closely resemble ChatGPT, such as Claude from Anthropic, Gemini from Google, Perplexity from Perplexity AI Inc. and MS Copilot from Microsoft.

All these AI tools originate from American Big Tech companies. Due to digital autonomy considerations, the use of American AI tools is not always desirable.

European alternatives

There are European alternatives that may be appealing, particularly as we, as a university, value digital autonomy, European data hosting and clear privacy rules. On the other hand, the well-known American or Chinese AI tools often offer a slightly better user experience and more features. If you opt for a European alternative for ethical reasons, you should bear in mind that this may require some compromises in certain areas.

Below are some examples of European providers you might want to consider if a European alternative suits you better. 

  • LeChat from the French company Mistral. You can disable training on your data in the settings.
  • LUMO from the Swiss/German company Proton. LUMO does not log chats and does not train AI models based on your data.

Please note that you can still only use these AI tools with an account based on your own private email address, and therefore not with your UU email address. The Conditions of use of AI tools by students always apply if you use the AI tools for your studies. Please consult these before use.

Local LLM

Another privacy-friendly option is to run an AI language model (Large Language Model, LLM) locally on your laptop. In that case, a connection to a cloud environment is usually not required during use. How well this works depends, among other things, on your processor and the available RAM on your laptop, but also on the size of the model.

AI tools offered by UU

At present (spring 2026), a number of AI tools for teaching use are being developed, and approval processes are underway for a number of existing AI tools.

For example, UU is currently working on the development of its own AI education platform called SolisChat. On this platform, your teacher creates chatbots for specific courses. This ensures that, as a student, you always work with the correct AI index level for each chatbot (and therefore for each course).

Furthermore, a pilot is underway with teachers and students on SURF’s AI education platform: EduGenAI. Teachers can sign up for this.

As soon as our own AI education platform has been developed, and/or other AI tools have been approved for use by students, you will find this information on this page.