BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) is an option in AI software that lets a user connect the tool to a 📝large language model provider with their own 📝API key instead of the model access the vendor bundles with its product.
The Visual Studio Code documentation for 📝GitHub Copilot states that "Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) lets you connect to any compatible model provider," with built-in providers including Azure, Anthropic, Gemini and OpenAI. Depending on the provider, the page says, a user needs "an API key and other configuration details like the endpoint URL." In Local harness sessions, "BYOK models work without signing into a GitHub account and without a Copilot plan," although "BYOK applies to the chat experience and utility tasks only," and an administrator can disable the feature through policy.
In MythOS, the 📝BYOK feature lets a user connect their own AI provider key to Chat & RAG instead of drawing on platform credits, with keys encrypted at rest.
The term also has a cloud-security sense involving customer-supplied encryption keys. Microsoft's Azure Key Vault documentation describes a customer securely transferring a key "from their on-premises HSM outside Azure, into the HSM backing Azure Key Vault," a process it calls bring your own key. Google Cloud's Compute Engine documentation on customer-supplied encryption keys says "you provide your own encryption keys" and that "Google does not store your keys on its servers."