How the AI Scholar works

What happens to your question, whose writings are searched, who else sees what you type, and how often it actually answers. This page is written to be checked, not to persuade.

What it answers, and whose words

It answers from the published writings of the scholars listed below, and from nothing else. It has no opinion of its own and it never answers from memory. When the published texts do not cover your question, it says so and sends you to the office.

Ayatollah al-Sistani (may Allah prolong his life)

Can be asked in 7 languages: Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Turkish, English, French and Azerbaijani.

Texts last checked against sistani.org: 28 July 2026. Rulings can change after that day, and only the office can tell you whether one has.

His office: sistani.org

This list comes from the service itself, not from this page. A scholar appears here when the service will actually answer for him, and only then.

Everyone may ask 2 questions a day.

What happens to your question

It reads your question to work out what to search for.
It searches every language that scholar's works are published in, not only the language you wrote in.
Every passage it shows you is copied from our stored text and checked letter by letter against that stored record before you see it. A passage that does not match exactly is dropped rather than shown.
It writes a short answer in your language, as sentences that each point at one of those passages.
Two checks then read that answer against the passages, sentence by sentence. The first asks whether the passage really says what the sentence says. The second asks whether the sentence keeps the same conditions and exceptions the ruling carries.
If either check objects, the answer is withheld — or, where the repair step is switched on, rewritten once and put through both checks again in full before anything is shown. An answer that still does not pass is withheld. You are told it was withheld, and you are still shown the passages that were found.

Who sees your question

The list below was checked against the service's own code on 13 September 2026. It is every outside party that receives any part of what you type.

Cloudflare: Delivers this site and runs the service. Your question passes through it, and it is stored there for the periods below. Cloudflare also runs the quick anti-abuse check that confirms you are a person; that check receives your IP address, and your IP address is also used to limit how many questions come from one network in a day. No location beyond that is read or recorded.
Cloudflare Workers AI: Turns the search terms into a long list of numbers — a fingerprint — so passages with a similar meaning can be found. The text of your question, or a rewriting of it, reaches this service.
Anthropic: Receives your question twice: once on its own, to work out what to search for, and once together with the passages that were found, to write the short answer. Where the repair step is switched on, an answer a check has objected to is rewritten once, and your question reaches Anthropic again for that rewriting and for the check that asks whether the rewritten answer holds together. The two checks that judge each sentence receive only the sentences and the passages, never your question. A Claude model does this work; the service does not publish which one.

Nobody else. There is no analytics service, no advertising, and no other third party — the service makes no other outbound request of any kind.

What is kept, and for how long

There is no sign-in. There is no account to create, and you are never asked for a name, an email address or a telephone number.
The answer is kept for 24 hours so that you can open it again, and is then deleted.
Your question is also written to the log we use to check this tool's accuracy, and stays there for six months. If you judge an answer, your question and your judgement are kept for longer than that: checking whether the answers are right is the whole purpose of this beta.
“Clear my history” on the ask page deletes the stored answers outright and removes this device's anonymous identifier from the log and from every judgement you have sent. The questions themselves stay in the log, no longer linked to you.
The list of your past questions is kept in this browser alone. It never reaches us, and you will not see it on another device.

How often it answers

Between 5 and 10 September 2026, fourteen questions were put to the public service and one was answered; nearly all the rest were held back by a check rather than answered. On 10 September twelve real questions were run again through the same checks: four were answered, seven were held back by a check, and one was reported honestly as not covered by the published writings.

That is a great deal of withholding, and we would rather publish it than not. A withheld answer is this design working as intended: a check could not confirm the answer against the texts, and we would rather give you nothing than give you something wrong.

Measured on 10 September 2026.