Last updated: 14 June 2026
The Quokka3 Support Assistant (“the Assistant”) is an AI-powered chatbot available on www.quokka3.com. This page summarises how it works, what data it processes, and the contractual controls that apply. For the full legal text, see our privacy policy.
Scope of this statement. The Assistant is the only artificial-intelligence system AF Simulations GmbH operates, and it runs on this website only.
The Quokka3 simulation software itself — the graphical interface, the solver core, the command-line tools and the cloud simulation service — contains no artificial-intelligence or machine-learning components. It is deterministic numerical physics: the same inputs produce the same outputs, and no part of it is trained on, learns from, or interprets customer data.
From release 3.1.0 Quokka3 additionally provides an MCP interface, which lets an AI assistant supplied by the customer call Quokka3’s ordinary functions. That interface adds no artificial intelligence to Quokka3; see “MCP integration — your AI, not ours” below.
At a glance
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| What does it do? | Answers user questions about the Quokka3 solar-cell simulation software. |
| Is the user told they are talking to an AI? | Yes — on the chat interface and in the privacy policy. |
| Where is it hosted? | Amazon Web Services, region eu-west-1 (Ireland, European Union). |
| Which language model is used? | Anthropic’s Claude (Sonnet 4.6), accessed via AWS Bedrock. |
| Are user chat inputs used to train AI models? | No. Contractually excluded under the AWS Bedrock Service Terms. |
| Is the AI model fine-tuned on customer data? | No. The model is the standard Claude Sonnet 4.6 hosted on AWS Bedrock; we do not fine-tune it. See “Source of the Assistant’s domain knowledge” below. |
| Are chat transcripts stored? | No. Sessions are stateless and held only in volatile memory. |
| Is any metadata extracted from chat questions? | Yes — each question may be classified into a broad technical topic category (e.g. “optics”, “IBC simulation”). Only the topic label is retained; the message text is not stored. |
| Is chat data sent to Anthropic directly? | No. The model runs inside AWS Bedrock; AWS — not Anthropic — operates the inference infrastructure. |
| Are international transfers involved? | Chat content stays in the EU. AWS operational metadata may be transferred to the US under the EU–US Data Privacy Framework and SCCs. |
| Is automated decision-making (GDPR Art. 22) involved? | No. The Assistant provides information only. |
| Is a Data Processing Agreement available? | Yes, on request via our contact form. |
Architecture
End user (browser)
│ HTTPS / TLS
▼
Quokka3 Website (www.quokka3.com)
│ embedded chat widget
▼
AWS API Gateway (eu-west-1)
│
▼
AWS Lambda function (eu-west-1)
│ stateless invocation
▼
AWS Bedrock (eu-west-1) ─── Anthropic Claude (Sonnet 4.6)The entire request-response path runs inside the AWS eu-west-1 region (Ireland). The Quokka3 backend has no database that stores chat content. Each user message and the prior session history is passed in-memory to the language model and the answer is returned synchronously.
MCP integration — your AI, not ours
From release 3.1.0, licensed Quokka3 users can connect an AI assistant of their own choosing to Quokka3 through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). For the avoidance of doubt:
- What we supply is an interface. The Quokka3 MCP server exposes a fixed set of ordinary, deterministic Quokka3 functions — knowledge-base search, settings-file validation against the release schema, worked-example lookup, and cloud-simulation submission, monitoring and retrieval. None of these is an artificial-intelligence system; each returns the same result for the same input.
- What we do not supply is the AI. The assistant on the other side of the interface is the customer’s: their choice of vendor, their account, their contract, their data-processing terms. AF Simulations GmbH is not a party to that relationship, has no access to the customer’s conversation with their assistant, and charges nothing for it.
- Where the data goes. Content sent to Quokka3 over MCP — typically a settings file — is processed exactly as any other cloud simulation submission, under the same terms as the graphical interface and command-line paths. We do not forward it to Anthropic or to any other AI provider. Content the customer’s assistant sends to its own AI provider is governed by the agreement between the customer and that provider, not by this statement.
- Authentication. MCP access uses a per-user personal access key generated in the Quokka3 interface. It authenticates as that user against the customer’s licence and expires with the licence.
Source of the Assistant’s domain knowledge
The Assistant’s Quokka3-specific expertise is not encoded in the language model itself. It comes from a separate, team-curated knowledge base provided to the model as ordinary text at the time of each request. The knowledge base consolidates:
- The official Quokka3 documentation — user guide, modelling guide, settings reference, limits, changelog and worked examples.
- Published scientific literature — core methodology papers and a set of application/validation papers selected for their educational value.
- The Quokka3 team’s accumulated technical expertise from years of supporting Quokka3 users. This is general technical know-how compiled by the team; it contains no personal data, customer identifiers, company or institution names, or commercial information.
The language model is not retrained or fine-tuned on this content. The knowledge base is a static text document that the model reads at inference time. We list this here so enterprise security reviewers can distinguish cleanly between the source of the Assistant’s domain knowledge (a curated text document) and the question of whether the language model itself was trained on customer data — it was not, and this is contractually excluded under AWS Bedrock.
Data flows
| Data | Where it goes | Retained? |
|---|---|---|
| User-typed chat message | AWS API Gateway → AWS Lambda → AWS Bedrock (Claude), all in eu-west-1. | No persistent storage. Discarded when the session ends. |
| Chat history within a session | Held in the user’s browser memory and re-sent with each follow-up message for context. | Discarded when the browser tab is closed. |
| Account identifier (logged-in users) | AWS Lambda (for license-scope check). | Not stored beyond the request. |
| Operational metrics (counts, latencies, error rates) | AWS CloudWatch (eu-west-1). | Up to 12 months. No message content. |
Contractual controls
- No model training on customer data. Under the AWS Bedrock Service Terms, AWS does not use customer inputs or outputs to train or improve the underlying foundation models, and does not share them with the model provider (Anthropic). This is the standard Bedrock contract and applies to every Bedrock customer.
- EU data residency. The AWS region is configured to
eu-west-1. Inference does not move out of the EU. - GDPR Data Processing Addendum. The AWS GDPR DPA, incorporating the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, applies between AF Simulations GmbH and AWS.
- EU–US Data Privacy Framework. AWS is certified under the DPF for the limited operational metadata transferred to its US affiliates.
What we ask users not to enter
We instruct users via the chat interface and the privacy policy not to submit:
- personal data of other people;
- confidential commercial information (pricing, NDAs, unpublished business information);
- trade secrets or proprietary cell-recipe / process information that they are not authorised to disclose to a third party.
The Assistant does not need this information to be useful. We recommend that users describe their case in generic technical terms.
Human review
A small, sampled subset of operational logs may be reviewed by Quokka3 staff for quality assurance and debugging. Where reasonably possible these samples are anonymised first. Chat content is not shared with third parties other than the named AWS sub-processors above, and is never used for marketing.
Limitations and disclaimers
The Assistant is an AI system. Its answers can be incomplete, outdated or wrong. They are not engineering advice and are not a substitute for the Quokka3 documentation, the published scientific literature, or direct consultation with the Quokka3 team. For licensing, commercial or safety-critical questions please contact us via our contact form.
Changes to this statement
We will update this page if the underlying architecture, sub-processors, region, or model provider changes. Customers with a written Data Processing Agreement will be notified in accordance with the terms of that agreement.
Contact
- Data controller: AF Simulations GmbH, Germany (full contact details in the privacy policy).
- Contact: via our contact form.
- Privacy policy: on our website.