Terms of Service
The short version. grothendieck is a harness. It does not sell you AI — it drives the AI subscription you already have, on a machine you already own. What you write and what the models write back is yours; we claim nothing in it beyond what is needed to run the service for you.
Because your own provider account is doing the work, your agreement with that provider still governs it, and that matters most when you lend your machine to someone else. And because the answers come from a language model, they are not verified and are not advice.
This summary is not the agreement. Where the two differ, the agreement below is what holds.
1. This agreement
These terms are between you and Grothendieck Labs ("grothendieck", "we", "us"). You accept them by signing in — the sign-in screen says so above the field — and the version you accepted is recorded against your account. If you do not accept them, do not sign in.
You must be at least 16 years old to use grothendieck. If you are using it on behalf of an organisation, you are confirming you have the authority to bind that organisation.
2. What the service is
grothendieck gives you threads: you ask a question, an AI agent works on it, and its progress and results stream back and stay in one place. The work itself happens in one of three ways:
- On your machine. You install a runner, which drives an AI harness that is already signed in there, under your own subscription with that AI provider.
- On a machine someone lends you, under their subscription — see §5.
- On our hosted tier, on our infrastructure under our own commercial API keys — see §6.
We hold your account, your threads and their complete history, your artifacts, and the records that make the above work. We do not perform inference and we do not hold model credentials.
The service is in beta. Features change, and some of them change abruptly.
3. Your account
Your account is your email address. You can prove you hold it in one of two ways: a code we email you, or signing in with Google if the address on your Google account is the same one. Both reach the same account — the second is a shortcut, not a separate identity.
Anyone with access to that inbox, or to that Google account, can sign in as you, so keep both secure; you are responsible for what is done under your account. If you believe someone else has used it, revoke the session from your device list and tell us.
Signing in with Google is subject to Google's own terms and privacy policy, which are between you and them. We cannot recover access to a Google account, and if you lose one you can still sign in here by email.
You may delete your account at any time from the account menu. Deletion is immediate and irreversible, and is described in the Privacy Policy.
4. Your AI provider — the part that is not between us
This section matters more here than in most products, because of where the work happens.
When a run executes on your machine, it is your account with Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor, or another provider that authorises and pays for it. That relationship is between you and them, on their terms, and nothing here changes it. You agree that:
- You will use those providers only in ways their own terms allow.
- You will not use grothendieck to give anyone access to a provider account in a way that provider prohibits.
- You will comply with each provider's acceptable-use policy for anything you run through it here. Where their policy is stricter than §8, theirs is what binds you.
We are not a reseller, a proxy, or an intermediary for any AI provider, and we do not resell model capacity. If your provider suspends or limits your account, the runs that depended on it will stop working, and there is nothing we can do about that.
5. Lending a machine
You can lend one of your machines to one other person by sending them a code. Read this before you do.
- Their work spends your subscription. Runs they start on your machine are authorised by the AI account signed in there — yours — and count against your limits and your bill. That is the point of the feature, not a side effect.
- Your provider's terms decide whether you may. Many consumer AI subscriptions prohibit sharing an account with another person. Whether lending your machine is permitted is a question about your agreement with your provider, and it is yours to answer. By creating a sharing code you confirm you have satisfied yourself that it is allowed. We are not a party to that agreement and cannot make it permissible.
- What confinement means. A machine can only be lent while it reports that runs on it are confined to a per-run workspace by an operating-system sandbox, and the service refuses to create a code otherwise. That confinement is a strong boundary but not a guarantee: sandboxes have escapes, the AI harnesses being driven are third-party software we do not control, and network access from inside the sandbox is open. Lend a machine to someone you trust, and understand you are lending them a computer.
- Either side can end it, at any time, from the compute page. Ending it stops future runs; it does not undo work already done or spend already incurred.
- A code works once, expires, and can be retired before it is claimed. Send it the way you would send a key.
The person who borrows a machine agrees to the same terms in the other direction: their use of it is subject to the owner's provider's rules, and they may not use a borrowed machine to do anything they could not do on their own.
6. The hosted tier
If you have no machine of your own, you may be offered a hosted runner. There, the model provider's customer is us, not you, and your prompts reach that provider under our commercial agreement with them. Our obligations to that provider therefore extend to your use: you must comply with their acceptable-use policy, and we may stop a run or suspend access if you do not. The hosted tier may have quotas, and it may be withdrawn.
7. What you write, and what the model writes
Yours. You own what you put into grothendieck and, as between you and us, you own the outputs produced in your threads. We claim no ownership of either.
Our licence. You grant us only the licence needed to operate the service for you: to store your content, transmit it between your devices and machines, and display it back to you. It is non-exclusive, worldwide only because servers are, and it ends when you delete the content or your account. We do not use your content to train models, and we do not give it to anyone to train on.
You are responsible for what you put in. Don't upload content you have no right to, and think before pasting other people's personal data into a thread.
Outputs are not verified. They come from a language model. They can be confidently, fluently wrong; citations can be wrong or invented; a figure can be drawn correctly from a false premise. Nothing grothendieck produces is legal, medical, financial, or professional advice, and none of it should be relied on for an important decision without checking it against a source. The product is built to make a model's reasoning legible precisely so that you can check it — that is your job, and it stays your job.
Skills you publish. A skill you write is content under this section. By publishing one into the registry you grant us and other users of the service a licence to retrieve and execute it as part of the service. We may remove a skill that breaks these terms. Published skill versions are immutable — retiring a skill stops it being offered, and does not erase the versions that past runs recorded, so that what a run actually read stays reconstructible.
8. What you may not do
- Break the law, or help someone else break it.
- Violate any AI provider's acceptable-use policy through this service.
- Use it to generate malware, run attacks, or gain unauthorised access to anything — including through a machine someone lent you.
- Harass, defraud, impersonate, or target anyone; generate sexual content involving minors; or produce material designed to deceive people about who wrote it or where it came from.
- Resell access, or interpose yourself between other people and an AI provider.
- Attack the service: circumvent rate limits, probe other accounts, forge tickets or credentials, or overload the infrastructure. Good-faith security research reported to security@grothendieck.io is welcome and is not covered by this clause.
We may suspend or terminate an account that does these things, and where the breach is serious we may do it without notice.
9. Availability, and no warranty
We will try to keep the service up and your data safe, and we make no promise about either. The service is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, and any warranty as to the accuracy or reliability of model outputs. Some jurisdictions do not allow these exclusions; where that is so, they apply to the extent permitted.
You should not treat grothendieck as the only copy of anything that matters to you. The export described in the Privacy Policy exists so that keeping your own copy is a single click.
10. Liability
To the extent the law permits, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data, or lost opportunity, arising from your use of the service — including anything that follows from acting on a model's output, and including anything that happens on a machine you lent to someone else.
Our total liability for any claim relating to the service is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or one hundred euros. Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.
11. Ending it
You may stop using the service, and delete your account, at any time. We may suspend or end your access if you breach these terms, if we are required to, or if we discontinue the service — in the last case, with as much notice as we can reasonably give, and long enough to export your data. Sections 7 (as to ownership), 9, 10 and 12 survive.
12. Changes, and how you will hear about them
If these terms change in substance, the version at the top of this page moves, and the next time you open grothendieck it asks you to read and accept the new version before going on. You can decline by signing out, and by deleting your account if you want the data gone too. Continuing to use the service after accepting is what makes the new version binding. Typo fixes do not move the version.
13. Law, and disputes
These terms are governed by the law of Singapore, and the courts of Singapore have exclusive jurisdiction — except that if you are a consumer in the EU or UK, you keep the protection of the mandatory law of the country you live in, and may bring proceedings there. If a provision is unenforceable, the rest stands. Our not enforcing something immediately is not a waiver of it.
14. Contact
General: hello@grothendieck.io
Privacy: privacy@grothendieck.io
Security: security@grothendieck.io