Elicit

About Elicit

Elicit is an AI-powered research assistant designed to accelerate academic literature review. Built by Ought, a US AI safety research organisation, Elicit allows researchers to query a database of over 200 million academic papers using natural language, automatically extracting structured data from papers, summarising findings, and comparing evidence across studies. The platform is particularly useful for systematic literature reviews, meta-analyses, and research synthesis tasks that traditionally require many hours of manual reading. Researchers can upload their own PDFs, run structured data extraction across large paper sets, and export results in CSV format for further analysis. Elicit was acquired by Archieve in 2024. It is incorporated in the United States and processes data on US-based cloud infrastructure. The company does not currently offer EU data residency options, which limits its suitability for institutional European deployments under strict data governance frameworks. Regarding AI training, Elicit uses large language models from external providers. User queries and uploaded documents may be processed by these underlying models. Users should review the current privacy policy and terms of service to understand data retention practices, particularly if uploading unpublished research or commercially sensitive documents. Elicit does not currently publish SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certifications. For individual researchers or small academic teams, this may be acceptable, but European universities or research institutions with formal procurement requirements are likely to find the compliance posture insufficient without additional assurances. Pricing has moved from a fully free model to a freemium structure. A free tier provides limited monthly queries. The Plus plan at $10/month offers significantly higher usage limits and advanced extraction features. Teams and institutional plans are available on request.