Terms of service

The agreement

By creating an account or using Cortex you agree to these terms. If you are agreeing on behalf of an organisation, you are confirming you may bind it. You must be at least 13 years old, and if you are under 18 you need a parent or guardian’s permission.

What you get

A licence to use Cortex for as long as your account is in good standing, subject to the limits of your plan. Plans, prices and entitlements are shown in Settings, and the limits shown there are the ones in force for your account.

What you may not do with it

• Anything illegal, or anything that would make us party to something illegal — fraud, harassment, stalking, or the production of child sexual abuse material.
• Generating malware, exploiting the sandbox, attacking other systems, or attempting to reach data belonging to another account.
• Presenting Cortex’s output as human-written where doing so would mislead somebody who has a right to know, or removing the AI disclosures from anything you pass on.
• Reselling access, or using the service to build a competing model — including large-scale extraction of outputs for training.
• Automated access outside the documented API, or evading rate limits and quotas by any means.

We may suspend an account we believe is doing any of this. Where the situation allows it, we will tell you why first.

Who owns what

What you put in

Yours. You grant us only the licence needed to run the service — to process, store and transmit it so Cortex can answer you. Nothing broader, and nothing that survives deletion.

What Cortex generates

Yours, to the extent we hold any rights in it. Two caveats worth stating plainly: generated text may not be copyrightable at all in some jurisdictions, and two people asking a similar question may receive similar answers, so you cannot assume exclusivity.

Cortex itself

Ours. These terms grant no rights in the software, the models, or the marks.

You are responsible for what you do with an answer. Checking it before relying on it is part of using the product — see the AI disclosures for what Cortex is and is not.

Billing

Paid plans bill monthly in advance in US dollars, excluding tax. Cancel at any time and the plan runs to the end of the period you have paid for; we do not refund a partial month, and we do not bill you again after you cancel. Prices can change with 30 days’ notice by email, and a change never applies to a period already paid for.

Enterprise agreements are separate and, where they conflict with these terms, they win.

Availability

We aim to keep Cortex up and we do not promise a particular uptime on self-serve plans. Maintenance, upstream model provider outages and capacity limits all happen. An Enterprise agreement can carry a service level; these terms do not.

Warranties and liability

Cortex is provided “as is”. To the extent the law permits, we disclaim implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. We do not warrant that answers are accurate, complete or suitable for any purpose.

Our total liability arising out of these terms is limited to what you paid us in the 12 months before the claim, or $100 if that is greater. Neither side is liable for indirect, incidental or consequential damages. Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited — including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.

Ending it

Delete your account from Settings whenever you like. What that destroys, and when, is in the privacy policy. We may terminate an account for a material breach of these terms, or with 30 days’ notice for any reason, refunding the unused part of a prepaid period if we do.

Governing law and disputes

These terms are the agreement between you and Cortex Foundation, the publisher of this service. They do not name a court or a jurisdiction of incorporation, because none is on record here to name. Nothing here prevents you from bringing a claim where you live, in a small-claims court, or from contacting a regulator.

Changes

We will give you 30 days’ notice by email before a material change takes effect. Continuing to use Cortex after that is acceptance; if you would rather not, cancel and we will refund the unused part of the period.

Questions go to legal@cortex.foundation.