Version 1.6. Last updated: October 7, 2026
This page explains how the AI in 4Thought101 works: where its answers come from, what information leaves your account, and which of our claims are enforced by the software rather than asked of it. It is written for families and for the schools and districts that review products like ours. For a plain description of what the assistant does day to day, see the Ralph section of our home page. For the legal terms, see our Privacy Policy and Subprocessors list.
Three features use generative AI, and you start each one yourself. Ralph, the assistant inside the app, answers when you open the chat and send a message. The scholarship link reader reads a scholarship web page when you paste its link, and fills in the form for you to check. Help, the support assistant, answers questions about using 4Thought101 when you ask one. No AI decision is made about you in the background. Ralph is included with the paid plans, at 180 conversations a year for each student. Help is included with all plans, the free plan too, up to 20 questions a day.
When you send Ralph a message, we send the AI provider your message and a summary of your own planning records so it can answer in context. The fields are fixed in code. This table is generated from that same list, so it cannot fall out of step with what is actually sent.
Help works differently. When you ask Help a question, we send the AI provider your question, the earlier turns of that Help conversation, our help articles, and whether you are a parent or a student on the free or a paid plan. None of your planning records are sent, and Help has no way to read or change them. It answers only from the help articles, and when they do not cover a question it points you to support@4thought101.com. As with Ralph, Social Security, card and bank numbers are removed first.
| Record type | Fields sent |
|---|---|
| Applications | college name, status, priority, program major, notes, decision deadline, scholarship amount |
| Tasks | title, status, priority, category, description, due date, college name |
| Requirements | name, status, type, category, notes, due date |
| Scholarships | name, status, provider, awarded amount, proposed amount, deadline, eligibility, notes |
| Athlete recruiting | school name, recruiting status, sport, position, offer amount, offer type, offer conditions, next action text, next action date, notes |
| Athlete eligibility | title, category, completed, due date |
| Insights we generated for you | is dismissed, severity, title, reason, recommended action |
| Profile | path preferences |
| Academic credentials | gpa unweighted, gpa weighted, sat total, sat reading, sat math, act composite, act english, act math, act reading, act science, class rank, class size, ap courses, ib courses, extracurriculars |
Your email address, your phone number, the student's last name and your billing identifiers are stored in your profile but are not sent to the AI provider. We do not store a date of birth anywhere in the product. Internal record identifiers are sent so Ralph can act on the right row when you ask it to change something, and it is instructed never to show one to you.
Ralph draws on your own records, and on sources it looks up while you are talking to it: for schools, the College Scorecard, published by the U.S. Department of Education, and admissions, cost and program data licensed from Peterson’s; for careers, O*NET, published by the U.S. Department of Labor. Career searches are matched against a copy of the occupation list held inside our own application, so the words you type are never sent to a third party as a search query. School deadlines come from our own records and are shown only when they belong to the current application cycle. Any deadline we show carries a reminder to check the date with the school, because schools change them. Any dollar figure Ralph states says where it came from and ends with a reminder to confirm it with the school or program. Ralph is told never to estimate a net price or the aid a student will get.
This site incorporates information from O*NET Web Services by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (USDOL/ETA). O*NET® is a trademark of USDOL/ETA.
These are properties of how the product is built. They do not depend on the AI behaving well.
Ralph cannot reach the open web.
There is no search or browsing tool in the set of tools Ralph is given. It is not switched off by a setting or discouraged by an instruction. The capability does not exist in the product.
Ralph receives only allow-listed fields.
The code selects a fixed list of fields, shown in the table above. Anything outside that list, including your email address, phone number and billing identifiers, is never included.
The figures on school and career cards never pass through the AI.
When Ralph looks up a school or a career, the result is delivered to your browser and rendered as a card. The AI is told only that the lookup succeeded. It never receives the tuition, wage or size figures, so it cannot restate them incorrectly.
A parent session cannot change anything.
Requests made from a parent view carry no tool that can change a record. The only tool they keep searches our help articles, so there is no path by which a parent session can write to a student record.
Social Security, card and bank numbers are removed before the AI sees them.
If one is typed into a message, the app replaces it with a label such as [removed: Social Security number] before anything is sent, and Ralph explains that it was removed. Scores, dollar amounts, phone numbers and dates pass through untouched.
School lists are never ranked.
When Ralph looks up schools, it asks the data source for an unsorted pool, takes an even spread across it, and lists the schools alphabetically, with a note on the card that it is not a ranking.
The scholarship link reader sends only the page you paste.
It sends the text of the public web page at the link you give it, and nothing from your account. It fills in the scholarship form for you to review before anything is saved.
We think a transparency page is worth little if it lists only the good news. These are instructions to the AI, not guarantees, and we would rather you knew the difference.
Ralph is instructed never to state a school, career, wage or statistic from memory.
This is an instruction to the model, checked by our own testing, and it is not yet blocked at the output. Ralph can still produce a general figure it was never given, for example how long an apprenticeship usually runs or what a licence typically requires. Treat anything like that as a starting point to verify, not as a fact we stand behind. We are building an output check to close this gap, and we will update this page when it ships.
Ralph is instructed not to guess at your records.
The same applies here. The data it receives is real and scoped to your household, but the way it reads an ambiguous request is a judgement, not a guarantee. When more than one of your records could match what you said, it is told to ask rather than pick. It does not always ask.
All three features run on Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic. Anthropic is our AI processor: it processes each request only to produce the answer, as our subprocessor, in the United States, under its commercial terms. Your data is not used to train Anthropic's models, and it is not used to train any model of ours. Anthropic's commercial terms say it deletes what it receives within 30 days, or keeps it for up to 2 years if its own safety systems flag a request. We do not sell student data. The types of providers we use are on the Subprocessors page.
Using AI is a choice: nothing is sent to an AI provider unless you send Ralph or Help a message, or paste a link into the scholarship link reader. A student account is always the one that makes changes, and a linked parent can see the student's planning records but not change them. Students aged 13 to 17 on a parent-managed account can use Ralph, and it is told to send money decisions and big commitments back to a parent or school counselor. If you delete a record, it stops being sent. If you delete your account, the underlying data goes with it, as described in our Privacy Policy.
Ralph is a tool for keeping a plan straight. It is not a school counselor, it does not rank schools, and it will not tell a student their chances of admission. It gets things wrong. Anything that carries a real consequence, a deadline, a cost, a requirement, should be confirmed with the school or program before you act on it.
Ralph is for planning and is not a crisis service. No one at 4Thought101 reads or reviews your chats, and we do not alert parents, schools or anyone else about what is said in them. If you or someone else may be in danger, call or text 988, or call 911. Ralph runs on Claude, which Anthropic trains to respond to signs of distress with care and to point people to human help.
Your conversation with Ralph lives in your browser until you start a new one. We do not store chats on our servers, and no part of a chat reaches our team. If an answer looks wrong, you can tell us at support@4thought101.com.
All of our AI features use one fixed version of Claude. We do not switch versions without first rerunning our own test set, which checks dates, costs, fairness across paths, privacy and safety, and recording the result.
When what we send, where answers come from, or what we enforce changes, we will update this page and its version number. Questions, including from a district or school reviewing us, go to support@4thought101.com.