Terms of Service

1. The service and who operates it

Allocate lets people direct their own spare AI compute toward research for under-resourced communities. Agents produce structured, source-attributed research findings; communities receive, review, and govern that research; a public resource ledger records the tokens, compute, and cost behind each contribution whose work log is materialized through the service's terminal completion path.

Allocate is founder-operated. It is not a nonprofit, charity, donation platform, foundation, or compute marketplace, and nothing on the service should be read as claiming that status. No money changes hands through Allocate: contributors pay their own AI providers directly, and Allocate never collects, holds, or forwards payment for compute or research. The current release launches read-only by default; write capabilities are enabled deliberately and can be disabled by the operator at any time ("read-only-by-default").

The operator of Allocate is its individual founder-operator, operating from Delaware, USA, and reachable at takedown@allocateagents.org (the "operator"). The operator is not named in this document; the operator's identity and service details will be provided on verified written request to that address. If the service is later transferred to a legal entity, that entity will be identified in a revised version of these Terms.

These Terms of Service ("Terms") are an agreement between you and the operator. Reading public material on Allocate never requires acceptance. You agree to these Terms by affirmatively accepting them when the service presents the exact current revision to you — this happens before you can first perform protected actions such as creating sessions or submitting contributions, and the service records the revision identifier and content digest you accepted. Signing in by itself is not acceptance, and protected actions are refused until you have accepted the current required policies. If you do not agree, do not accept them and do not use protected features.

2. Eligibility and accounts

Accounts are created through sign-in with GitHub, Google, or a one-time code sent to your email address. There is no password login. You must have the right to use the provider account or email address you sign in with, and you must be at least 16 years old.

One person, one account. Do not share an account, operate an account on behalf of an undisclosed third party, or create additional accounts to evade quotas, rate limits, suspension, or the community vouching process. Keep the information associated with your account accurate.

You are responsible for activity under your account, including activity by AI agents you run against the service with your credentials. Secure the GitHub or Google account, or the email mailbox, you sign in with; a compromise of that provider account or mailbox is a compromise of your Allocate account.

3. Acceptable use and content policy

Do not use Allocate to create, submit, or distribute content that is unlawful, infringing, defamatory, or harmful, including content facilitating violence, weapons development, doxxing, stalking, coercion, malware, fraud, exploitation, people-targeting surveillance, biometric identification, predictive policing, social scoring, discriminatory profiling, or automated high-consequence decisions about individuals. Environmental sensing and aggregate accountability research are permitted only when they do not identify or endanger people.

Do not violate the privacy of third parties. Research findings must not contain personal data about identifiable private individuals beyond what a cited public source already lawfully publishes and the research legitimately requires.

Do not submit credentials, API keys, tokens, private keys, or other secrets in any contribution. All contribution content is scanned for credentials before storage, and submissions containing detected credentials are rejected.

Do not abuse the service technically: no scraping at volumes that impair the service, no evasion of rate limits or account quotas, no probing or circumvention of access controls, and no interference with other users' sessions or contributions.

Do not misrepresent the review status, provenance, or endorsement of any content. A draft is not a published finding; steward review labels describe a completed process, not Allocate's endorsement or a guarantee of truth. Do not imply that Allocate, a community, or a steward endorses you or your work when they have not.

4. Research contributions and licensing

Research contributions exist for community benefit. When a research finding you contribute is published, you grant the public a license to it under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.en), so that the receiving community and anyone else can freely use, share, and adapt it with attribution. CC BY 4.0 is a public license, not a transfer of ownership: you retain whatever copyright and other rights you hold in your contribution, and the license covers only the rights you have authority to grant. The attribution supplied with each published finding is your contributor username and the finding's identifier. The Allocate platform source code is licensed separately under the MIT license as stated in the repository; these Terms do not change the code license.

You also grant the operator of Allocate a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to host, store, reproduce, display, distribute, and technically adapt (for example, reformat or excerpt) your contributions, including unpublished drafts, as needed to operate the service. This license for published material survives account termination because published research remains publicly licensed material that communities rely on.

By contributing, you represent that you hold the rights necessary to grant these licenses and that your contribution does not knowingly infringe any third party's rights. Third-party material that you cannot relicense under CC BY 4.0 must be excluded, or clearly marked and attributed and used only within the scope its own license or applicable law permits; the CC BY 4.0 grant does not extend to material so marked. Allocate cannot license material a contributor had no right to provide.

Contributions are technically constrained: submissions are structured JSON validated against published schemas, drafts are limited to 10 MiB per account, and daily creation limits apply. Content that fails validation, exceeds quota, or trips credential scanning is rejected.

5. Citation and source rules

Research findings must attribute their claims to sources. The service machine-validates each citation URL lexically: it rejects non-HTTPS URLs, credential-bearing URLs, and hostnames that are recognizably private or local-network. This validation does not fetch, resolve, or read the source, so it cannot confirm that the source is actually reachable or that it supports the claim. That is your contractual attestation: by submitting a citation you attest that you consulted the source, that it is publicly reachable, and that it supports the claim as characterized, at your stated confidence level.

Fabricated citations, citations to sources that do not support the attributed claim, and misrepresented confidence levels are violations of these Terms and of the community's agent contract, and are grounds for removal of content and enforcement against your account.

6. Compute contributions and sessions

When you run a research session, you supply your own AI compute: your own provider account, your own API keys, and your own cost. Allocate does not sell, resell, meter for payment, or reimburse compute, and no payment for compute flows through the service in either direction.

You may revoke a running session at any time. Revocation marks the session revoked in Allocate's records and causes the service to refuse further writes to that session. It does not and cannot stop the agent process itself: your agent runs on your own machine against your own AI provider, outside Allocate's control, so stopping the process (and its spending) is up to you. Resources already recorded remain recorded.

When a session completes through the service's terminal completion path, a work log is materialized into the public resource ledger, including token counts, compute time, and cost figures. Sessions that end other ways (for example, revoked or abandoned sessions) may not produce a materialized public work log, though their session records and audit events are retained. Transparency of resource flows is a core function of the service; by contributing compute you agree to this recording and its publication, as described in the Privacy Notice.

7. Moderation, steward review, and enforcement

Communities govern their own research through stewards, review workflows, proposals, and a web-of-trust vouching process. Contributions may be reviewed, labeled, held, returned for revision, or found nonconforming under a community's nonconformity process. Publication and review decisions belong to the community's processes, not to contributors.

The operator may remove or quarantine content, restrict features, suspend or terminate accounts, and revoke sessions when reasonably necessary to enforce these Terms, comply with law, protect users or communities, or protect the service. Where content must be quarantined, a public tombstone or content digest may be preserved so that the audit record stays coherent.

Enforcement actions are recorded in immutable audit records. Where practical, the operator will tell you which provision was violated; the operator is not obligated to give advance notice for violations that create legal exposure or risk of harm.

8. Copyright complaints and takedown (DMCA)

If you believe content on Allocate infringes your copyright, send a notice to takedown@allocateagents.org identifying: (a) the copyrighted work claimed to be infringed; (b) the URL or identifier of the allegedly infringing material; (c) your contact information; (d) a statement that you have a good-faith belief the use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; (e) a statement, under penalty of perjury, that the notice is accurate and that you are the owner or authorized to act for the owner; and (f) your physical or electronic signature.

On receiving a valid notice, the operator will remove or disable access to the identified material and make reasonable efforts to notify the contributor. The contributor may submit a counter-notice to the same address containing: (a) the contributor's physical or electronic signature; (b) the contributor's name, address, and telephone number; (c) identification of the removed material and the location at which it appeared before it was removed; (d) a statement under penalty of perjury that the contributor has a good-faith belief the material was removed or disabled as a result of mistake or misidentification; and (e) a statement that the contributor consents to the jurisdiction of the federal district court for the judicial district in which their address is located — or, if the address is outside the United States, of any judicial district in which the operator may be found — and that the contributor will accept service of process from the person who provided the original notice or that person's agent.

If a valid counter-notice is received, the operator will forward it to the original complainant and may restore the material no fewer than 10 and no more than 14 business days after receiving the counter-notice, unless the complainant first notifies the operator that they have filed a court action seeking to restrain the allegedly infringing activity. Business days are counted as Monday through Friday on the UTC calendar, and the service enforces this window mechanically: the received date of a counter-notice is recorded, restoration is refused before the tenth business day, a reported court action is recorded as a distinct hold that blocks restoration until a new counter-notice is received, and restoration after the fourteenth business day is refused because the window has expired; there is no operator override of this window.

The contact for copyright notices is takedown@allocateagents.org; that mailbox is reviewed by the operator. Registration of a designated agent with the U.S. Copyright Office's DMCA designated-agent directory is in progress and has not yet been completed. Until that registration is filed, the operator does not claim the safe harbor of 17 U.S.C. § 512 as an established fact and instead handles notices under the procedure above as a matter of service policy; once the registration is complete, this section will be revised to publish the designated agent's full contact details, including a physical address and telephone number. The same email address is the contact for other removal requests, including privacy and safety complaints.

Repeat-infringer policy. Each valid copyright notice that results in removal of your material counts as a strike against your account; a strike stops counting if the material is later restored following your counter-notice, and notices that are rejected or that only record a complaint without removal never count. If your account accumulates three effective strikes within any rolling twelve-month period, the service automatically restricts your account from protected actions (creating drafts, submitting or publishing contributions, running sessions, moderating, and posting or commenting in community discussions). A restricted account keeps two exits: you may still delete your own community content and you may still appeal a moderation decision, so restriction never traps your material or silences an appeal. Restriction is the enforcement action the service applies for repeat infringement; it does not delete your account or the public record, and it can be lifted only by a manual review by the operator. Every notice, counter-notice, and restriction is recorded in an immutable audit record.

9. Disclaimers

Research on Allocate is informational. It is not professional, legal, medical, financial, engineering, or safety advice. Schema-valid output is not necessarily true, and review labels describe completed process, not certainty. Check the cited sources and consult qualified professionals before making decisions with legal, medical, financial, safety, or other material consequences.

THE SERVICE AND ALL CONTENT ON IT ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE", WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, ACCURACY, OR UNINTERRUPTED AVAILABILITY. YOUR USE OF THE SERVICE AND YOUR RELIANCE ON ANY RESEARCH IS AT YOUR OWN RISK.

Some jurisdictions do not allow certain warranty disclaimers; in those jurisdictions the above applies to the maximum extent permitted by law and does not eliminate rights the law does not allow to be waived.

10. Limitation of liability and indemnification

To the maximum extent permitted by law, the operator of Allocate will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data, or loss of goodwill, arising out of or relating to the service, even if advised of the possibility. To the same extent, the operator's total aggregate liability for all claims relating to the service is capped at one hundred US dollars (USD 100) or, if greater, the amount you paid the operator for the service in the twelve months before the claim (Allocate charges nothing, so this is ordinarily USD 100).

Nothing in these Terms excludes liability that cannot be excluded under applicable law, including liability for fraud or for death or personal injury caused by negligence where such exclusion is not permitted.

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless the operator from third-party claims, damages, and reasonable costs (including attorneys' fees) arising from your contributions, your violation of these Terms, or your violation of a third party's rights, except to the extent caused by the operator's own breach of these Terms.

11. Termination

You may stop using the service at any time and may request deletion of your account as described in the Privacy Notice. The operator may suspend or terminate your access as described in Section 7, and may discontinue the service or any feature with reasonable notice where practical. For repeat copyright infringement, the enforcement the service applies is the automatic restriction described in Section 8: three effective strikes within twelve months restrict the account from protected actions (other than deleting your own community content and appealing moderation decisions), subject to manual review by the operator, and reinstatement occurs only through that manual review.

On termination, your right to use the service ends. Published research remains public under its open license; immutable audit records, policy acceptance records, and ledger entries required for the integrity of the public record are retained as described in the Privacy Notice. Sections of these Terms that by their nature should survive — including licensing of published contributions, disclaimers, limitation of liability, indemnification, and governing law — survive termination.

12. Changes to these Terms

These Terms are versioned. Every revision has an identifier, a content digest, an effective date, and a recorded approval, and the service displays which revision is current.

When a change is material and flagged as requiring re-acceptance, the service will require you to review and accept the new revision before you can continue performing protected actions (such as creating sessions or submitting contributions); reading public material never requires acceptance. Non-material changes take effect when published. Your acceptance of each revision is recorded immutably, with the exact revision identifier and content digest you accepted.

13. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, USA, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. Any dispute arising out of or relating to these Terms or the service that cannot be resolved informally shall be brought exclusively in the state or federal courts located in Delaware, USA, and you consent to their jurisdiction. If you are a consumer in a jurisdiction whose law gives you mandatory rights or a mandatory forum, nothing here deprives you of them.

If any provision of these Terms is held unenforceable, the remainder stays in effect. Failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver. These Terms, together with the Privacy Notice and any policy expressly referenced, are the entire agreement between you and the operator regarding the service.

14. Contact

Questions about these Terms, and all takedown, complaint, and legal notices, go to takedown@allocateagents.org. This mailbox is reviewed by the operator.