AI-Studio/app/MindWork AI Studio/wwwroot/changelog/v26.9.1.md

# v26.9.1, build 256 (2026-09-xx xx:xx UTC)
- Added tools that AI models can use on their own, starting with Web Search and Read Web Page. When you ask something a model cannot answer from what it knows, it now searches the web, reads the pages it found, and answers with the sources it used. You decide which tools a model may use, right below the message field, and you can watch it work: AI Studio shows which tool is running and, afterward, every call it made with its result. Whether tools are offered at all depends on the model because it has to support them. Read Web Page works right away; for Web Search you pick a search service in the app settings — Tavily or Staan with a free API key, or a SearXNG instance you run yourself. Set up more than one, and they can take turns when one of them finds nothing, or be asked all at once with their results combined. Many thanks to Peer Schütt (`peerschuett`) and Nils Kruthoff (`nilskruthoff`) for building this feature.
- Added safeguards around everything these tools bring back. Anything fetched from the web is treated as untrusted: AI Studio removes instructions hidden in a page before a model reads it and tells you when it did, exactly as it already does for the documents and web pages you load yourself. A model can never point a tool at your own network. Each tool states how much you have to trust a provider before it may be used with it, so your questions do not travel further than you allow. You can adjust that requirement per tool in the app settings.
- Added tools to the assistants. Each assistant has its own tool settings: which tools it starts with and whether you get to change them while you work. The chat, the coding assistant, and the Slide Builder always show the selection; for every other assistant you switch it on where you want it.
- Added tools to the Batch Processing assistant, so a batch run can look things up while it works through your documents. You choose them next to the instructions of the job, and every document is processed with the same set. The log file now records which tools were used for each document, and whether a call failed or was blocked, so you can tell how an answer came about.
- Added tools to the policies of the Document Analysis assistant. A policy states which tools an analysis may use, and the AI uses exactly those — nobody has to pick them per document. AI Studio warns you beforehand when the provider you selected is not trusted enough for a tool the policy names. IT departments can roll policies out together with their tools.
- Added tools to assistant plugins and direct-chat launchers. Plugin authors name them in the new `ToolIds` field, either as the tools an assistant runs with or as the tools a launcher preselects for the chat it opens; the example assistant plugin shows both. Which tools an assistant asks for is part of what you get to see before you enable it: its security card names them, and the security audit takes them into account.
- Added tools to the Assistant Builder. For a direct-chat launcher you pick them yourself, alongside the workspace, provider, and data sources. For an assistant, the AI chooses from the tools installed here and says so in the draft, so you see the decision before the assistant is written.
- Added organization-wide management for tools. Among other options, IT departments can switch tools off entirely, disable individual ones, or define the provider trust a tool requires. You do not have to write any of it by hand: set a tool up in the app, then export its configuration as ready-made Lua code for your plugin, with encrypted API keys if you want them.
- Added tool calling to the abilities you can state yourself in the expert provider settings. When you use a model AI Studio does not recognize as tool-capable, you can now declare that it is, the same way you already could for image input or reasoning.
- Added local RAG as a beta feature, so the AI can answer from your own documents. You point AI Studio at a folder or at a single file, and it prepares those documents in the background so their contents can be found again later. Ask a question with such a data source selected, and AI Studio looks for the passages that fit your question and hands only those to the model, along with where each one came from. We will keep developing it together with the people who use it: to try it, open the app settings, allow preview features down to beta, and then enable the RAG feature. Many thanks to Paul Koudelka (`PaulKoudelka`) for around ten months of work on the concept and the implementation.
- Added the setup for local data sources. You pick an embedding provider, and AI Studio asks for your confirmation before any document goes to a cloud service. It keeps up with your files as they change, shows the progress on a page of its own, and checks every document for hidden instructions before indexing it. Documents without readable text, such as scanned pages, are remembered as such, so AI Studio does not work through them again after every start — it comes back to them once they change.
- Added support for several drop areas on the same page. More complex assistants can now receive files or folders by drag and drop at more than one place.
- Added drag and drop to the input and output folder of the Batch Processing assistant: drop a folder onto either field to choose it.
- Added ways to load text from a file and drop zones for them, throughout the assistants and dialogs. We went through them one by one, so many fields that used to accept typed text only now take the content of a file as well.
- Improved loading web content in the assistants: it now uses the same reader as the Read Web Page tool, which extracts the main content of a page more reliably and skips navigation and boilerplate. Pages from your own network, including local servers, keep working as before. When a page cannot be read, AI Studio now says why instead of leaving the field empty.
- Changed how provider trust and provider confidence work together. Marking a provider as trustworthy in a configuration no longer also satisfies a required confidence level: one says who runs the provider, the other how confidential it is. Organizations raise a provider's level in their own confidence scheme instead. This applies beyond local data sources, for example, when a model reads a page from your intranet.
- Fixed a dropped file being processed several times, e.g., after the computer woke up from sleep.
- Fixed the Visual Briefing Assistant (in preview) not scrolling, which put everything below the window edge out of reach and made the assistant unusable. The briefing preview is now shown at its intended size inside its frame, and switching between the desktop, tablet, and mobile view changes its width as it should.
- Upgraded the Visual Briefing Assistant (in preview) from the prototype to the beta state. The assistant is now completely implemented and is undergoing a deeper testing phase in preparation for release. To try it, open the app settings, allow preview features down to beta, and then enable the Visual Briefing Assistant there.