What happens to the text you paste

What is kept, and what is not

Your assignment text is never stored. First Light holds no record of what you pasted and no record of the analysis it gave back. The result sits in your browser while you read it, so the Results and Print pages can render it, and when you close the tab it is gone.

There is no account, so there is nowhere a pattern of use could accumulate, and no way for your use to shape how First Light scores anyone else’s assignment.

Two things are kept, and neither is your text. Anonymous hosting figures — page visits, load times, and each visit’s country, device type, operating system, browser and referring site — are collected by Vercel, which hosts the website. And to stop one person running hundreds of analyses, we count analyses against the internet address your browser connects from, ten per hour. That count expires by itself and is never connected to what you pasted.

Where your text goes

When you click Analyze, your text goes from your browser to First Light’s server, and from there to Anthropic, whose Claude model does the analysis. The result comes back the same way. Our server passes the text through and keeps no copy.

• ◈Anthropic is the only place your text goes. It is not sent to any other AI vendor.
• ◈As of July 2026, Anthropic’s published policy is that they delete what is sent to them within 30 days.
• ◈They hold it longer only where they must enforce their own usage rules or comply with the law.
• ◈They do not use it to train their models.
• ◈Anthropic’s current policy: data retention and API and data retention.

Less is better. We keep none of your text, and the 30-day window is Anthropic’s, not ours.

We update this page when Anthropic’s policy changes. The “Updated” date at the top reflects the last review.

Please don’t paste student work

First Light is designed to analyze assignment prompts — the instructions you give your students. It is not designed to analyze student submissions, drafts, or anything else that could identify a specific student.

We can’t technically prevent you from pasting student work; the tool sees text without knowing its origin. The workflow is built around faculty self-discipline and the analysis surface: prompts go in, prompt feedback comes out. The homepage asks for an assignment you wrote, and says First Light never sees student work.

If you have a hypothetical example to test against, that’s fine. Real student work belongs in your LMS, not a third-party tool. This is true of First Light and any other AI tool you might be considering.

For institutional buyers

If your Center for Teaching & Learning, IT, or procurement office needs additional documentation — DPA, security questionnaire response, FERPA stance for your specific use case — email john@firstlight.solutions.

The full list of outside services First Light uses: Anthropic for the analysis, Vercel for website hosting and the anonymous visit figures, and Upstash for the hourly count that limits how many analyses one connection can run.