Pedigree Forge includes an AI assistant — a chat panel that can answer questions about genealogy, read your project, and make changes to it on your instruction. It is not a search box or a wizard: it is a conversation with a capable but fallible research assistant who has been given the keys to your filing cabinet.
Before you use it, read this page in full. The assistant is powerful and genuinely useful, but it changes real data, and the safeguards that matter are the ones you put in place yourself.
Pedigree Forge does not sell AI, resell it, or include it in the purchase price. You open an account directly with an AI provider — Anthropic or OpenAI — and paste the API key they give you into Pedigree Forge. The assistant then talks to that provider on your behalf, and that provider bills you for what you use.
This keeps things honest in both directions: you pay only for what you actually use, you can see the usage on your own provider account, and you can revoke the key at any moment without touching Pedigree Forge.
Setting up an AI provider covers how to get a key and where to enter it.
When you ask a question, the assistant does not guess at your data — it queries it. It has read access to essentially everything in the open project: people, families, facts, dates, places, names, notes, sources, citations, transcripts, archives, contacts, and timelines. It can also run the same queries the Queries panel uses.
It can also change the project. It can create, edit, and delete people, facts, notes, sources, citations, and contacts; link and unlink parents, children, and spouses; reorder children and spouses; and navigate the application to a record so you can see what it has done.
It does not ask permission before each change. If you say "add a baptism for each of these children", it adds them.
Warning — Save your project and take a backup before working with the assistant, particularly the first few times. Changes it makes are real edits to your data.
Whatever the assistant reads in order to answer you is sent to your chosen provider as part of the conversation, along with anything you attach. That includes names, dates, and places of living people if those are the records it looks at.
If your project contains information about living relatives, or material given to you in confidence, decide deliberately whether you are willing for it to leave your computer. Nothing is sent until you send a message, and nothing is sent from a project you have not asked about.
Your API key is stored with your Pedigree Forge settings on this computer and is sent only to the provider it belongs to.
The AI features are experimental. Two quite different kinds of error are possible, and it is worth keeping them separate in your mind:
Changes made by the assistant enter your project like any other edit and can generally be reversed with Undo on the Edit menu — but a single instruction may produce dozens of changes, and unpicking them one at a time is tedious. A saved file and a backup are a far better safety net than undo.
The assistant rewards a particular way of working: give it a precise task, ask it to report before it acts, check what it did, then repeat. That style will be familiar if you have used agentic AI tools — assistants that carry out tasks rather than just answering — or if you are comfortable with scripting and queries.
If you have not used tools of this kind before, start by asking questions only, and do not let it write anything until you have a feel for how it behaves. Getting the best out of AI is the page to read next: the difference between a poor result and an excellent one is almost entirely in how the request is phrased.