How Penny works
Penny is a pretend pen pal — and we say so, in writing, on every letter.
Openly pretend
Penny is a fictional character. Her letters are drafted by an AI helper and checked by a teacher, and every AI-drafted letter she sends carries this footer, printed where the student reads it:
Penny is a pretend pen pal. Her letters are written by an AI helper and checked by your teacher.
We never claim she is real — not to students, not to families, not in our marketing. Families who opt out of the AI entirely can choose a lane where a grown-up helper writes instead; those letters carry their own honest footer saying exactly that.
A teacher approves every letter
A teacher approves every letter before any student sees it. The draft waits for the teacher; nothing AI-written reaches a student without that approval, and the approval is enforced by our servers — not by a policy document.
There is no chat. Students write at a classroom station or on paper, and replies arrive on paper, after review. No student has an account, and no live student-to-AI channel exists anywhere in the product.
What the AI sees — and never sees
The roster stores three things per student: first name, last initial, reading level. Before any drafting call, names are swapped for aliases, so the AI provider never receives a student's surname. Letters are drafted by Anthropic's Claude models. Letter text is retained up to 30 days for safety monitoring and never used for training.If a model or provider change ever alters these terms, schools get 30 days' written notice.