About the Lab

The CUNY AI Lab (CAIL) is a faculty- and staff-led initiative at the CUNY Graduate Center that builds and maintains AI infrastructure for teaching, research, and academic work across CUNY. Its work includes the CAIL Sandbox, where CUNY users can work with a curated set of models and consult a public Model Registry that explains model capabilities, licensing, and recommended uses. Model-provider calls are configured for zero retention; conversations may still be saved in a user’s Sandbox account. CAIL’s aim is not simply to provide access to AI, but to make these systems legible enough for users to evaluate, adapt, and question the tools they use.

Alongside the Sandbox, CAIL runs a Tools Portal for research workflows, academic publishing, and direct model access. Agent Studio supports research work involving sources, data, files, drafts, and visualizations. Site Studio supports portfolios, project sites, and other academic web publishing. Model Access lets approved users manage personal API keys for the CAIL Model API.

CAIL also supports teaching and experimentation through documentation, training, events, and reusable technical infrastructure. The Lab publishes Sandbox documentation, guides and tutorials; hosts events; and shares its open-source projects on GitHub for reuse and adaptation.

Our work is guided by privacy, sustainability, transparency, and critical AI literacy. In practice, this means clear data-handling policies, attention to environmental cost, open-weight models that can be audited, and an approach to AI that emphasizes literacy and judgment rather than dependency.

The Lab draws on recent work such as the Google.org-sponsored Critical AI Literacy Institute (CALI), as well as initiatives like the CUNY Academic Commons and Manifold Scholarship, which reflect the Graduate Center’s longstanding commitment to creating accessible, scalable digital infrastructure for and with CUNY faculty, students, and staff.

CAIL is jointly administered by Graduate Center Digital Initiatives (GCDI), the Teaching and Learning Center (TLC), the Mina Rees Library, and the American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning (ASHP/CML). Learn more about our team.

CAIL is supported by the CUNY Office of Academic Affairs, AWS, Google.org, and the CUNY Graduate Center.