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Terms of service ยท effective 20 September 2026

The terms you are agreeing to, said plainly.

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The short version

These terms are a contract between you and Syntology LLC. By using syntology.ai, app.syntology.ai, our API, or our MCP endpoints, you agree to them. If you are using the service for an organisation, you are agreeing on its behalf and you are telling us you may.

  • The service indexes public research papers and public code. Most of what it shows you belongs to someone else and arrives under someone else’s licence. You have to honour those licences; we cannot grant them to you.
  • A verification level is a record of a test that ran, not a promise that code is correct or safe. Read “What verification means” below before you rely on any of it.
  • Automated and agent access is allowed and expected — it is what the API is for. Abuse, resale of the raw corpus and circumventing limits are not.
  • The service is pre-release. There is no uptime commitment yet, and things will change.
  • We disclaim warranties and cap our liability, as nearly every service does. Sections 13 to 16 are the ones that limit your remedies, and they are written in plain language rather than hidden.
  • Disputes go to individual arbitration in Colorado, and you waive class actions and jury trial — unless you opt out within 30 days, which section 17 tells you how to do.

1. Who we are, and what these terms cover

Syntology LLC is a limited liability company formed in Colorado, United States. These Terms of Service (the “Terms”) govern your access to and use of the Syntology websites, the Atlas application, the graph and code APIs, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) endpoints, the feed, the reviewer tool and anything else we offer under the Syntology name (together, the “Service”). They take effect on 20 September 2026.

Our Privacy Policy and our attribution page are part of these Terms by reference. If you do not agree to the Terms, do not use the Service.

2. The Service, as it actually is

Syntology holds a provenance-tagged graph of research literature and a corpus of code harvested from public repositories, and serves both to people through a website and to software agents through an API. Some of that code has been executed in a sandbox and carries a record of what happened; most has not.

Pre-release

The Service is under active development and is offered on a pre-release basis. We make no uptime, availability, latency or support commitment, and we have not published a service level agreement. We may add, change, suspend, limit or remove any part of the Service, including free tiers and individual endpoints, at any time. Where a change would break something you depend on and we can reasonably give notice, we will try to; we do not promise to.

Figures we publish about the corpus — how many samples exist, how many are verified, at what level — are measurements taken at a stated time, and they move. They are not warranties.

3. Accounts, tokens and your credentials

Some parts of the Service are free and need no account. For the rest you will have an account, an API token, or both.

  • You must give accurate information and keep it current.
  • You are responsible for everything done with your account or token, including by your agents and your software. A token is a bearer credential: whoever holds it can spend your balance.
  • Keep tokens secret. Do not commit them to a public repository, and do not embed them in a client you distribute. Tell us at legal@syntology.ai if one leaks and we will revoke it.
  • One account per person or organisation. Do not create accounts or mint trial tokens in bulk to get around a limit or a price.
  • You must be at least 16 years old, and old enough where you live to enter a contract.

4. Acceptable use

Automated access is permitted. The Service is built for software agents and we would rather you used it that way. Nothing in this section prohibits ordinary programmatic use of the API or MCP endpoints within the limits of your plan.

What you must not do:

  • Exceed, evade or interfere with rate limits, quotas, bot checks or metering — including by rotating IP addresses, minting tokens in bulk, or sharing one entitlement across parties who should each have one.
  • Scrape or bulk-extract the corpus wholesale in order to republish it, resell it, or stand up a substantially similar service. Using the API for your own work, including commercial work, is fine; taking the database and becoming us is not. Section 9 sets out what you may and may not do with the data itself.
  • Probe, scan or test the security of the Service except under section 12, or try to reach data, accounts or systems you are not authorised to reach.
  • Upload or submit anything unlawful, defamatory, malicious, or infringing; anything containing malware; or personal data about other people that you have no right to give us.
  • Use the Service to build a dataset for training a model that competes with the Service, where that use would breach an upstream licence the material arrived under.
  • Misrepresent the Service — in particular, presenting a verification level as a guarantee of correctness, or presenting our measurements as certification or endorsement.
  • Remove, obscure or falsify provenance, attribution or licence information attached to anything we serve.
  • Interfere with the Service’s operation, or with anyone else’s use of it.

We may investigate suspected breaches and may suspend access while we do. Where we can, we will tell you what happened and give you a chance to fix it before we terminate.

5. Limits, metering and fair use

Free and paid tiers carry limits: queries per token, calls per day, requests per minute. Current limits are described on our pricing and developers pages, and we may change them. Coverage questions (“do you have X?”), opening a paper, and the Atlas map itself are free, and we intend to keep them that way; that intention is not a contractual commitment.

Metered calls draw on a prepaid balance shown on your account page. Nothing is charged automatically when that balance runs out — calls are refused instead. We would rather turn a request away than bill you by surprise.

6. Plans, payment and cancellation

  • Payment. Payments are processed by Stripe. Card details go to Stripe, not to us, and are governed by Stripe’s own terms and privacy policy in addition to these.
  • Prices and tax. Prices are shown at checkout and read live from Stripe. Tax is added at checkout and calculated for your location. You are responsible for any other taxes your own jurisdiction imposes on you.
  • Renewal. Subscriptions renew automatically for successive periods at the then-current price until cancelled. We will tell you before a price increase takes effect on your subscription, and you may cancel rather than accept it.
  • Cancellation. You may cancel at any time from your account page or the Stripe customer portal. Cancellation stops the next renewal; access continues to the end of the period you have paid for.
  • Refunds. Fees are otherwise non-refundable, except where the law requires a refund, where we have charged you in error, or where we withdraw a feature you had paid for and cannot give you a comparable one. If you think you have been billed wrongly, write to legal@syntology.ai within 60 days and we will look at it properly.
  • Unpaid or failed payments. We may suspend or downgrade access if a payment fails and is not cured after we have told you.
  • Consumers in the EEA and the UK. You normally have 14 days to withdraw from a distance contract. Because the Service is digital content supplied immediately, by subscribing and using it you ask us to begin at once and acknowledge that you lose that right once performance has begun. Nothing here removes a statutory right you cannot waive.
Read this one

7. What verification means, and what it does not

This is the most important section in these Terms, because it is the one most likely to be misread in a way that hurts someone.

Where the Service shows a verification level, an execution result, a metamorphic property, a contract, a novelty score or a similar label, that label is a record of a specific test that was run on specific inputs in a specific sandbox at a specific time. It is evidence about behaviour observed under those conditions. It is not, and must not be read as:

  • a statement that the code is correct;
  • a statement that the code implements the method described in the paper it is attached to;
  • a statement that the code is secure, or safe to run on your machine, with your data, or in production;
  • a statement that the code is free of defects, vulnerabilities, backdoors or malicious behaviour;
  • a statement that the code is fit for any purpose of yours;
  • a certification, audit, endorsement, or approval of the code, its authors, or the paper.
Code we serve is third-party code, and you run it at your own risk

Code in the corpus was written by other people and harvested from public repositories. WE DO NOT AUTHOR IT, AUDIT IT FOR SECURITY, OR VOUCH FOR IT. IT MAY BE WRONG, ABANDONED, INSECURE OR MALICIOUS. You are solely responsible for reviewing anything you obtain through the Service before you execute it, and for executing it in an environment you are willing to lose. We run harvested code only inside an isolated, network-disabled, unprivileged container, and we recommend that you do the same.

Labels can also simply be wrong. Our own published record documents cases where a level was recorded against insufficient evidence, where an instrument measured itself rather than the code, and where a verdict was corrected or withdrawn. We publish those corrections because we would rather be trusted than look tidy. It follows that you must not treat any single label as authoritative, and must not represent it to anyone else as more than it is.

8. Model-generated output

Parts of the Service use language models: conversational answers, generated reference implementations, novelty explanations, the reviewer tool, and drafted specifications. Model output can be confidently wrong, can misattribute, and can produce code that does not do what it says.

Output of this kind is provided for your evaluation, not as advice, and certainly not as legal, financial, medical or professional advice of any kind. Check it before you rely on it. You are responsible for what you do with it, including any code you deploy. Where output is generated from a paper or a repository, the underlying work remains that of its authors, and section 9 still applies to it.

9. Third-party content, and the licences it arrives under

Most of what the Service shows you is not ours. It arrives under its own terms, and those terms travel with it. This is set out in full on our attribution page; the operative points:

  • Code samples carry their own repositories’ licences. A sample served through the Service is governed by the licence of the repository it came from, which may be permissive, restrictive, incompatible with your use, or absent altogether — and code with no licence is all rights reserved, not public domain. We grant you no rights in it. Determining whether you may use a given sample, and complying with its licence, is your responsibility. Where we know a licence we show it; where we do not, the absence of a licence is not permission.
  • Paper-to-code link data derived from the archived Papers with Code dataset is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, and we pass that licence on unchanged. If you redistribute that material or an adaptation of it, you must attribute it and license your adaptation under CC BY-SA 4.0 or a compatible licence, exactly as that licence requires. Our own terms do not and cannot override it, and nothing in section 10 is intended to claim proprietary rights over it.
  • Paper metadata, abstracts, full text and peer reviews come from arXiv, Semantic Scholar, OpenReview, Crossref, OpenAlex and publishers, each under its own terms. Copyright in a paper belongs to its authors or its publisher. We index it; we do not license it to you.
  • Syntology is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, arXiv, Semantic Scholar, OpenReview, GitHub, Hugging Face or any other source we name. Naming them is attribution, not endorsement, in either direction.
If you hold rights in something we serve

Write to legal@syntology.ai. If you are the owner of a repository and would rather we did not hold or serve your code, say so and we will remove it — you do not need to send a formal infringement notice first, and we would rather hear it informally than not hear it. Section 11 sets out the formal route if you prefer it.

10. Our intellectual property, and what you may do with it

Subject to section 9, the Service itself — the software, the graph schema and structure, our own extraction and verification outputs, the verification reports, the site design, and the Syntology name and logo — belongs to Syntology LLC or our licensors, and is protected by intellectual property law.

While these Terms are in force and you are within your plan, we grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to access and use the Service, and to use the data and code you retrieve through it, for your own internal and commercial purposes — including building software, doing research, and publishing results. That licence does not let you:

  • redistribute or resell a substantial part of the corpus as a dataset or as a competing service;
  • remove or falsify provenance, attribution or licence metadata;
  • use our name, logo or trade dress to suggest we endorse you;
  • reverse engineer the Service except to the extent the law says you may.

If you publish research using the Service we would appreciate a citation, and the methodology page says how to cite it. That is a request, not a condition.

11. Content you submit, and copyright complaints

Your submissions. Feedback, bug reports, graph corrections, pasted text and uploaded PDFs remain yours. By submitting them you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to use, store, reproduce and modify them for the purpose of operating and improving the Service — for corrections, that includes publishing the corrected fact in the graph. You confirm you have the right to give us what you send, and that an upload does not infringe anyone’s rights.

Suggestions and ideas you volunteer we may use without obligation or compensation. Please do not send us anything you consider confidential.

Copyright complaints. If you believe material on the Service infringes your copyright, send a notice to legal@syntology.ai with: your contact details; identification of the work; identification of the material and where it is; a statement that you have a good faith belief the use is unauthorised; a statement, under penalty of perjury, that the information is accurate and that you are the owner or authorised to act; and your signature. We will remove or disable material expeditiously where a notice is valid, and we will tell the affected party, who may send a counter-notice. We may terminate the access of repeat infringers.

Please do not abuse this process. A knowingly false notice carries liability under 17 U.S.C. § 512(f).

12. Security research

We welcome good-faith security research and we will not pursue legal action over it, provided you do not access, modify or exfiltrate data belonging to anyone else, do not degrade the Service or run denial-of-service tests, do not use social engineering against our people or providers, give us a reasonable chance to fix the issue before publishing, and report what you find to legal@syntology.ai. Outside those bounds, section 4 applies.

13. Disclaimer of warranties

As is

THE SERVICE, AND EVERYTHING AVAILABLE THROUGH IT, IS PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, SYNTOLOGY DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED AND STATUTORY, INCLUDING THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, QUIET ENJOYMENT AND NON-INFRINGEMENT, AND ANY WARRANTY ARISING FROM COURSE OF DEALING OR USAGE OF TRADE.

In particular, and without limiting the above, we do not warrant that: the Service will be uninterrupted, timely, secure or error-free; the data, code, extractions, scores, labels, verification levels or model-generated output are accurate, complete, current or fit for any purpose; defects will be corrected; or that anything you obtain through the Service is free of harmful components. No advice or information, oral or written, obtained from us creates a warranty we have not given here.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties, so parts of this section may not apply to you. Where you are a consumer, your mandatory statutory rights are unaffected.

14. Limitation of liability

The cap

TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, SYNTOLOGY AND ITS MEMBERS, OFFICERS, EMPLOYEES, CONTRACTORS AND SUPPLIERS WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR ANY LOSS OF PROFITS, REVENUE, DATA, GOODWILL, BUSINESS OR ANTICIPATED SAVINGS, HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, EVEN IF WE HAVE BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY. OUR TOTAL AGGREGATE LIABILITY ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO THESE TERMS OR THE SERVICE WILL NOT EXCEED THE GREATER OF (A) THE AMOUNTS YOU PAID US IN THE TWELVE MONTHS BEFORE THE EVENT GIVING RISE TO THE CLAIM, OR (B) ONE HUNDRED US DOLLARS ($100).

These limits apply to all claims in the aggregate, not per claim, and they survive any failure of a limited remedy. They do not apply to liability that cannot lawfully be limited — including, in many places, death or personal injury caused by negligence, and fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation. Some jurisdictions do not allow some of these limits, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

You acknowledge that the fees for the Service, and the free tiers in particular, are set on the basis of these limits, and that we would not offer the Service on these terms without them.

15. Your indemnity

You will defend, indemnify and hold harmless Syntology LLC and its members, officers, employees and contractors from any claim, demand, loss, liability, damage, cost or expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of or relating to: your use of the Service; your breach of these Terms; your use of, or execution of, any code or data obtained through the Service, including any breach of an upstream licence; anything you submit or upload; or your violation of any law or of anyone’s rights.

We will tell you promptly of any claim, let you control the defence with counsel of your choice, and cooperate reasonably — and you will not settle anything that imposes an obligation or admission on us without our written consent.

16. Term, suspension and termination

These Terms apply for as long as you use the Service. You may stop at any time, and may close your account from your account page. We may suspend or terminate your access, with notice where practicable and immediately where necessary, if you breach these Terms, if your use creates a legal or security risk, if a payment fails and is not cured, or if we withdraw the Service.

On termination: your licence to use the Service ends, unpaid fees remain due, and we will refund any unused prepaid balance unless we terminated you for breach. Sections 7 through 11 and 13 through 19 survive termination, as does anything else that by its nature should.

Section 17 limits how you can sue us

17. Disputes: informal resolution first, then arbitration

17.1 Talk to us first. Before starting a formal proceeding, send a written description of the dispute and the relief you want to legal@syntology.ai. We will do the same for you. Both sides agree to try in good faith to resolve it for 30 days. This step is a condition of starting arbitration, and the limitation period is paused while it runs.

17.2 Binding individual arbitration. If that fails, you and Syntology agree that any dispute arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service will be resolved by binding individual arbitration, administered by the American Arbitration Association under its Consumer Arbitration Rules (for consumers) or its Commercial Arbitration Rules (otherwise), before a single arbitrator. The arbitration will be seated in Denver, Colorado, or conducted remotely or on documents if you prefer, and judgment on the award may be entered in any court of competent jurisdiction. The Federal Arbitration Act governs the interpretation and enforcement of this section.

Class action and jury trial waiver

YOU AND SYNTOLOGY EACH WAIVE THE RIGHT TO A TRIAL BY JURY AND THE RIGHT TO PARTICIPATE IN A CLASS, COLLECTIVE, CONSOLIDATED OR REPRESENTATIVE ACTION. THE ARBITRATOR MAY AWARD RELIEF ONLY IN FAVOUR OF THE INDIVIDUAL PARTY SEEKING IT AND ONLY TO THE EXTENT NECESSARY TO REMEDY THAT PARTY’S OWN CLAIM. If this waiver is held unenforceable as to a particular claim, that claim alone proceeds in court and the rest stays in arbitration.

17.3 What is carved out. Either party may bring a claim in small-claims court if it qualifies, and either party may seek injunctive relief in court to protect intellectual property or to stop unauthorised access to the Service. Nothing here stops you reporting a matter to a government agency.

17.4 Your 30-day right to opt out. You may reject this arbitration agreement by emailing legal@syntology.ai with your name, the account or token concerned, and a clear statement that you opt out of arbitration, within 30 days of first accepting these Terms. Opting out costs you nothing, changes nothing else about your access, and leaves section 18 to govern. If you opt out, the class-action and jury waivers in 17.2 do not apply to you either.

17.5 Batching. If 25 or more similar claims are brought by or with the help of the same counsel, the parties agree they may be administered in batches of up to 50, with one arbitrator and one set of fees per batch, to keep the process workable. 17.6 Changes. If we change this section materially, the change does not apply to a dispute we already knew about, and you may reject it within 30 days by the same route. 17.7 Consumers elsewhere. If you are a consumer in the EEA, the UK or another place whose law gives you a non-waivable right to bring proceedings locally, this section applies only so far as that law allows.

18. Governing law and venue

These Terms, and any dispute arising out of them or the Service, are governed by the laws of the State of Colorado, United States, and the applicable federal laws of the United States, without regard to conflict of law rules. The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply.

For anything not subject to arbitration under section 17, you and Syntology submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of the state and federal courts located in Denver County, Colorado, and waive any objection to that venue. If you are a consumer, this does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory law of your country of residence, or of the right to bring proceedings there where that law gives it to you.

19. The rest

  • Changes to these Terms. We may update them. For material changes we will update the effective date and notify account holders by email or in-product notice before they take effect. Continuing to use the Service after that is acceptance; if you do not accept, stop using it and cancel.
  • Entire agreement. These Terms, with the Privacy Policy and attribution page, are the whole agreement between us on this subject and replace any earlier understanding.
  • Severability. If a provision is unenforceable, it is limited or severed to the minimum extent necessary and the rest stands.
  • No waiver. Not enforcing a provision is not a waiver of it.
  • Assignment. You may not assign these Terms without our written consent. We may assign them to an affiliate or in connection with a merger, acquisition or sale of assets.
  • Force majeure. Neither party is liable for a delay or failure caused by something beyond its reasonable control, though this does not excuse a failure to pay.
  • No third-party beneficiaries. These Terms create no rights for anyone who is not a party.
  • Relationship. Nothing here creates a partnership, agency, employment or joint venture.
  • Notices. We may notify you by email to your account address or by posting in the Service. Notice to us goes to legal@syntology.ai.
  • Export and sanctions. You confirm you are not located in, and will not use the Service in, a country or by a party subject to US sanctions or export restrictions that would make your use unlawful.
  • US government users. The Service is a “commercial item” under FAR 2.101; government rights are no greater than those granted here.
  • Language. The English version of these Terms governs.

Contact

Legal notices, copyright complaints, billing disputes and security reports: legal@syntology.ai.
Privacy requests: privacy@syntology.ai.
Everything else: media@syntology.ai.

Syntology LLC, Colorado, United States. A postal address is available on request.

See also our Privacy Policy and our attribution and upstream licences page.

The Modern Ontology for AITermsPrivacyAttributionlegal@syntology.aiLast reviewed 20 September 2026