Introducing Ask the Council
Query several frontier AI models at once, watch them stream side by side, and have one model synthesize the answers into a single verdict.
What It Is
Ask the Council queries several frontier AI models at the same time, streams their answers side by side, and optionally has one model synthesize all of them into a single verdict.
No single model wins every prompt. So instead of guessing which one to trust, you ask all of them at once and read where they agree, where they split, and why.
What's Inside
- Multi-model. xAI Grok, OpenAI, Anthropic Claude (Opus and Sonnet), Google Gemini, and any OpenRouter model (default GLM 5.2), all running in parallel.
- Bring your own keys (BYOK). Keys are stored only in your browser and sent per request. No account, and no shared server key required.
- Synthesis. Pick a model to merge every response into one summary, with a prompt you can customize.
- Configurable models. Override the model id per provider from Settings.
- Light and dark theme. No flicker, and it remembers your choice.
- Local history. Conversations live in your browser (
localStorage), and an incognito mode saves nothing.
Everything else lives in one Settings panel: a temperature control, a no-flicker theme, an incognito mode that saves nothing, and a synthesis prompt you can rewrite to taste.
Why a Council, Not Just One Model
The frontier itself is moving this way. Labs like Sakana AI are no longer betting on a single model. Their recent work routes and combines multiple frontier models at inference time, through model merging and multi-model search, precisely because a committee of models beats any single one on hard problems. A council is that same idea, made usable.
But the bigger reason is practical, and it comes down to what you actually get when you go through someone else's wrapper.
Wrappers Quietly Throttle the Model
When you use a public wrapper, and even the native apps like ChatGPT or Claude Desktop, the product is optimizing for its own cost. It caps reasoning effort, trims tokens, and routes you to cheaper variants behind the scenes. You rarely get the top model fully unleashed.
Because Ask the Council calls each provider directly with your own key, you get the real model at full strength, not a throttled reseller path.
You Also Lose Provider-Native Tools and Data
Aggregators swap in their own tooling. Their web search might hit Google or Bing and hand every model the same generic results. That is not what these models can really do.
Each provider ships its own native stack: its own web search with its own larger context, its own code-execution sandbox, and its own data. Grok, for example, is the only model with live access to X. Push a prompt through an aggregator and you get a lowest-common-denominator answer. Push it through Ask the Council and each model uses its own search, its own tools, and the data only it can reach.
So a council is not just "more models." It is each model at full strength, with its own tools and its own data, and then one synthesis pass to reconcile them into something you can act on.
Try It
Ask the Council is live and free at council.darkgrove.io. Bring your keys, ask once, and let the council answer.
Follow @darkgroveio for updates. Built by DarkGrove Labs.