LibreChat

Artificial intelligence chatbot service

Faculty, Staff, Students

Web

No

Property	Value
Description	Artificial intelligence chatbot service
Access	Faculty, Staff, Students
Platform	Web

Description

LibreChat is an online service that provides a secure interface to a variety of Artificial Intelligence (AI) language models, including ChatGPT and Claude.

All the models used are private and none of them train on data entered to the site.

Getting Started

1. Must be on campus or using SwatVPN
2. Go to librechat.ai.swarthmore.edu
3. Log in with your Swarthmore Google account
4. Orienting to the screen (see the graphic below for a visual representation):
   1. On the upper left you will find a dropdown of the different AI companies
   2. To the right of that, another dropdown allows you to select the specific AI model you’d like to experiment with.
   3. At the bottom of the page is where you enter your prompt. A prompt can be entered as text or you can speak your prompt using the microphone at the far right of the prompt field.
5. Start experimenting by entering text in the chat box

e

Models

LibreChat provides several different AI models from leading companies as well as open-weights (non-proprietary) options. This list changes frequently. The list below shows options as of Summer 2026.

Model	Suggested end-user description	Quota guidance
claude-sonnet-5	Recommended for most work. Strong for drafting and revising writing, summarizing readings, developing course materials, planning projects, analyzing documents, and programming help.	Standard
claude-fable-5	For exceptionally difficult work. Use for complex research questions, advanced analysis, major coding projects, or long, multi-step tasks when other models have not produced a satisfactory result.	Premium — use selectively
claude-opus-4-8	Best for careful analysis, nuanced writing, complex research, and difficult programming. Consider Sonnet first for routine work.	Premium
claude-haiku-4-5	Fast and economical. Good for short summaries, email drafts, rewriting, brainstorming, classification, and straightforward questions. Start here for simple tasks.	Low
gpt-5.5	A powerful model for complicated professional and academic work, including document analysis, data interpretation, research planning, and advanced programming.	Premium
gpt-5.6-terra	Recommended general-purpose GPT model. Good for writing, teaching materials, research assistance, document analysis, data work, and moderate programming.	Standard
gpt-5.6-luna	Fastest and most economical GPT option. Good for quick questions, editing, summaries, brainstorming, routine emails, and simple explanations.	Low
gpt-5.6-sol	For the most demanding tasks. Best for difficult reasoning, advanced research, complex data analysis, and large programming projects. Try Terra before using Sol.	Premium — use selectively
gpt-oss-20b	An economical open model for routine questions, basic writing, technical explanations, and programming help. Results may require more checking and revision than premium models.	Low
deepseek-v3.2	A cost-conscious choice for mathematics, scientific and technical explanations, reasoning, data analysis, and programming. Useful when a stronger reasoning model is needed without using a premium option.	Low–Standard
qwen3-coder-30b	Economical programming assistant. Good for explaining code, debugging assignments or research scripts, generating examples, and working with Python, R, JavaScript, and other languages.	Low
qwen3-coder-480b	For difficult programming and software-development tasks, especially large codebases, complex debugging, or multi-file projects. Excessive for routine coding questions.	Premium
qwen3-coder-next	A strong coding-focused option for developing, debugging, testing, and documenting larger projects. A good middle ground between the 30B and 480B coding models.	Standard
grok-4.3	A versatile model for writing, analyzing long documents, working with images, producing structured information, and handling multi-step tasks.	Standard
glm-5	Best for complex programming, technical analysis, research workflows, and projects that require many connected steps. Use GLM-4.7 for less demanding work.	Premium
glm-4.7	A versatile option for writing, research assistance, presentations, creative work, and programming. Suitable as a general-purpose alternative to Claude or GPT.	Standard
glm-4.7-flash	Fast and economical. Good for summaries, translations, quick drafts, simple coding questions, and routine administrative work.	Low
kimi-k2.5	Particularly useful when your prompt includes screenshots, diagrams, charts, scanned pages, or interface designs. Also capable of writing, reasoning, and programming.	Standard
kimi-k2-thinking	For difficult academic reasoning, mathematics, research synthesis, complex programming, and problems that require sustained step-by-step analysis.	Premium
minimax-m2.5	A cost-effective option for office and academic productivity, including documents, spreadsheets, presentations, research tasks, and programming.	Low–Standard

Use Cases and Ideas

• Ask the AI tool to generate ideas for a title of a blog post or project
• Copy and paste some text and ask to refine or simplify
• Upload a file and ask to generate a summary.

Other Notes

• There are additional features such as Agents, Assistants, and Plugins that aren't fully configured by ITS yet and may not work.
• LibreChat tools can create diagrams and provide code but cannot generate files such as image files or PDFs. You can upload files and the AI can interpret them, but it cannot generate new files.

Troubleshooting

File Uploads

Some AI models can only handle uploads using certain file types. If you get an error when trying to upload a file, start a new chat, then select the "Upload as Text" option, which converts the contents of the file to text before sending it to the AI model.