Universities / University of Cambridge
University of Cambridge AI acknowledgement
Cambridge's university-wide rule is that unacknowledged AI content in summative work counts as academic misconduct, and the department, faculty or institute setting the assessment says how to acknowledge permitted use. The School of the Humanities and Social Sciences offers a sample declaration form (tool, prompt, purpose, how the output was changed), and the Department of Engineering requires you to declare all generative AI use in summative work.
Checked against University of Cambridge's own pages on 9 October 2026 · See the full rules
Write yours
University of Cambridge doesn't publish a fixed template, so this uses a general format that covers what it asks for.
University of Cambridge's own wording
SHSS 'Declaration of the use of Generative AI' is a table you fill in answering: Which permitted use of generative AI are you acknowledging? Which tool (name and version)? What prompt did you provide? What did you use the tool for? How have you used or changed the output?
Summarised from University of Cambridge's guidance.
The rules at a glance
- When you need one
- Whenever permitted generative AI is used in a summative assessment. Engineering: all generative AI use in preparing summative work must be declared unless the brief says otherwise.
- Where it goes
- Set by the department, faculty or institute; the SHSS sample is a separate declaration form (downloadable .docx).
- Prompts and outputs
- The SHSS sample form asks for the prompt you provided; no rule on keeping full logs.
- Must include
- which permitted use of generative AI you are acknowledging
- which tool you used (name and version)
- what prompt you provided
- what you used the tool for
- how you used or changed the AI's output
- Also note
- University statement: using any unacknowledged AI-generated content in a summative assessment as your own work is academic misconduct unless the brief explicitly says otherwise
- assessment-specific guidance overrides general rules and may ban normally acceptable uses (e.g. AI translation or grammar tools in language exercises)
- Engineering: do not use AI to generate raw text for submission without your own initial self-written base, and do not use it to automatically generate references or bibliographies
- you are responsible for every claim, citation and argument and must be able to explain your work; hallucinated sources or fabricated data can be misconduct
Sources
- https://www.cshss.cam.ac.uk/education/generative-artificial-intelligence-ai-and-scholarship/template-declaration-use-generative
- https://teaching26-27.eng.cam.ac.uk/content/use-generative-ai-policy
Your unit outline or the journal's author guide wins if it says something different. Spotted a change? Tell us.