What bringing your own key does
With no key of your own, analyses run on Kindred's built-in model, and that is all most people need. Adding your own Anthropic API key switches your analyses to run on your key. Everything else about how Kindred works stays the same; only the account the requests run under changes.
How to add your key
You add a key in Settings. Paste a key from your Anthropic console. Kindred verifies it with Anthropic before anything is stored, so an invalid key is caught at the door rather than failing later during an analysis.
How your key is protected
Your key is encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM and used only to make analysis requests on your behalf. It is never returned by the API and never written to logs, and once saved it is never shown again. You can replace or remove it at any time.
What changes when you use your key
Because your analyses then run on your own key, Anthropic bills their cost to your own Anthropic account rather than to Kindred. If you remove your key, your analyses simply go back to using Kindred's built-in model.