IAedu — Portugal's National AI Access Platform for Higher Education and Research

FCCN, the arm of Portugal's Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia that runs the country's National Research and Education Network (RCTS), launched IAedu on 16 May 2025 as a centrally operated, free-to-subscribing-institutions platform. It gives staff, researchers and students at participating universities a single, GDPR-compliant point of access to several large language models — including GPT-5.2, DeepSeek V3.2, Claude Opus 4.5, Llama 4 Maverick and AMALIA, a model built for European Portuguese — through both a web interface and an API.

FCCN frames the platform's goal as democratizing and ensuring equitable AI access across the Portuguese university system, while keeping user prompts out of model training.

Universities join by signing a protocol; NOVA University Lisbon signed in December 2025 and rolled the platform out to its whole community on 6 January 2026.

By June 2026, FCCN reported 25,000 active users and more than 450,000 conversations on the platform, which remains officially in beta. Both FCCN and NOVA's Vice-Rector for Pedagogical Innovation state that user prompts are not used to train or improve any of the underlying models.

These adoption figures are self-reported by the operator and its subscribing institutions, with no independent audit found; the platform reports usage volume rather than learning or academic-outcome measures.