Consensus outlines the following safeguards that it's built to reduce the risk of AI misuse:
- Search before synthesis: Every response starts with a literature search. This ensures all citations are real papers, never hallucinated or invented sources.
- Summarization, not speculation: Consensus's AI tools are strictly limited to summarizing content from the papers retrieved. They don’t “fill in the blanks” with outside knowledge.
- Transparent sourcing and attribution: Every claim is cited, and every citation is clickable. Consensus's interface enables users to inspect, verify, and reference the original source content with one click.
- AI “checkers” for relevance: Before summarizing, Consensus uses separate models to verify that the source actually contains information relevant to the query. If a paper doesn’t meet its threshold for relevance, it won’t be used in the response.
Consensus is built to enhance – not replace – the research process.