Legal

Terms of Service

Effective 13 September 2026. Plain English on purpose: this is what you agree to when you use Teraflock, whether you buy tokens or serve them.

1. Who and what this covers

These terms are an agreement between you and Teraflock, Inc. ("Teraflock", "we") for everything we run: the website at teraflock.ai and teraflock.com, the customer console at app.teraflock.com, the Teraflock API, the flockd daemon and the Teraflock desktop app (together, the "Node Software"), and the mesh they form (together, the "Service"). If you use the Service for a company, you are agreeing on its behalf.

The Service is in beta. Prices, models, and features change, and we say so in the changelog and on the pricing page rather than silently.

2. Who may use it

• You must be at least 18 and able to enter a contract.
• During the beta the Service is offered to customers and node operators in the United States only. You confirm you are in the US and are not on a US sanctions list.
• One account per person; an account belongs to the email address that signed in with Google, GitHub, or a sign-in link.

3. Accounts and API keys

You are responsible for what happens under your account and API keys. Keep keys secret; rotate one the moment you suspect it leaked, and tell us if you cannot. We may suspend a key or account that is being abused, is unpaid, or is under a payment dispute.

4. Buying inference (customers)

• Prepaid credits. You buy credits through Stripe and the API spends them per token at the rates on the pricing page: an input rate and an output rate per model class, batch requests at half the interactive rate, and an interactive surge multiplier that the API reports before it applies. Our token count is the billed count.
• Credits are a prepaid balance, not money. Purchased credits cannot be cashed out, transferred, or sold. They do not expire while your account is open. Refunds of unused purchased credits are at our discretion unless the law says otherwise; a card dispute pauses the account until it is resolved.
• Privacy tier is your choice, per request. On the open tier your prompt runs on a stranger's computer that could, in principle, observe it; on verified it runs only on high-reputation nodes under an operator agreement; on private it stays on first-party hardware. Read the Privacy Policy before sending anything sensitive on open.
• Verification. A sample of requests is silently duplicated to first-party reference hardware and the two outputs compared. That is how we catch a node faking the work; it means a request may be processed twice.
• Outputs. Whatever the model generates for you is yours to use, subject to the model's own license (below). Outputs are statistical text: check them before you rely on them, and do not present them as human-written where that matters.
• No service levels in beta. We route around failed nodes and fall back to first-party capacity, but we do not promise uptime, latency, or that any model stays in the catalog.

5. Acceptable use

You may not use the Service, or let anyone else use it through your keys, to:

• break the law or another person's rights: violence or terrorism, exploitation or endangerment of children, human trafficking, sexual violence, harassment or threats, unlawful discrimination, the unauthorized practice of medicine, law, or finance, collecting or processing personal or sensitive information without the right to, infringing others' intellectual property, or creating malware or attacking any system;
• create a risk of death or bodily harm: weapons, military or nuclear applications, illegal drugs, operating critical infrastructure or heavy machinery, encouraging self-harm, or inciting violence;
• deceive: fraud, disinformation, defamation, spam, impersonating a person without consent, passing model output off as human-generated, or fabricating engagement;
• generate sexually explicit content involving minors, or non-consensual sexual content of real people;
• hide known dangers of a system you build on the Service from the people it affects;
• attack the mesh itself: probing nodes, spoofing hardware, gaming verification, evading rate limits, or buying your own inference to farm operator payouts.

This list carries forward the acceptable-use terms of the model publishers whose weights the mesh serves (for example Meta's Llama Acceptable Use Policy and Google's Gemma Prohibited Use Policy); their terms apply to you directly as well. We suspend first and ask questions second when abuse is clear. Report a violation to hello@teraflock.ai.

6. Models and their licenses

The catalog is open-weight models under their own licenses; LICENSES.md lists every model, its license, and what it requires. Most are Apache-2.0 or MIT. Llama-family models are under the Llama Community License: Teraflock carries its attribution and notice obligations, and if you build a model from Llama outputs, its naming rule applies to you. Teraflock grants you no rights in the weights beyond what the upstream license already grants.

7. Serving inference (node operators)

Running the Node Software makes your machine part of the mesh. In addition to everything above:

• Your hardware, your responsibility. You must own or control the machine, pay for its electricity and bandwidth, and comply with your own internet service provider's terms. A node makes one outbound, client-initiated mTLS connection to the coordinator, listens on no public port, and moves token-sized traffic plus one-time model downloads. Teraflock does not represent that any particular ISP permits this use.
• Earnings. You earn credits for tokens your node serves at the payout share for the model's class (published on the pricing page), scaled by your node's reputation. Earned credits spend on your own usage 1:1 or are paid out in cash.
• Escrow and slashing. Every earning is held in escrow for seven days. If your node fails verification (a canary comparison, a fingerprint challenge, or timing outside its hardware's envelope), unvested earnings are forfeited and reputation falls; repeat or blatant failures mean a ban. Verification is statistical; you can dispute a slash and we show the evidence.
• Do not touch what you serve. On the open tier plaintext prompts necessarily pass through your machine's memory. You may not read, log, store, copy, or use any request or response, and you may not modify the Node Software or the runtime to do so. The daemon never writes them to disk by design; making it do so is a breach and a ban.
• No tampering. Do not misreport hardware, run a different model or quantization than assigned, replay or forge results, or run inference for the mesh anywhere except on the enrolled machine.
• Payouts. Cash payouts go to a Stripe Express account in your name. Stripe verifies your identity and bank details; we never see them. Payouts are a minimum of $25, monthly on the 1st (UTC), in US dollars at the same rate we sell credits. You are responsible for your taxes; we issue tax forms where the law requires.
• Our software on your machine. flockd is Apache-2.0 and open source; the desktop app is licensed to you for the sole purpose of participating in the mesh. Both update themselves to pinned, signed builds so every node runs the runtime the fingerprints were made for.

8. Intellectual property and feedback

Teraflock, the Teraflock marks, the console, the control plane, and the desktop app are ours. flockd and the protocol definitions are open source under Apache-2.0 in the teraflock GitHub organization. If you send us feedback, we may use it without owing you anything.

9. Ending things

You can stop at any time: delete your keys, unenroll your nodes, and email us to close the account. We can suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, is unpaid or under dispute, or that the law requires us to. Vested earned credits remain payable at the next payout run if your account was in good standing; forfeited credits are not.

10. Disclaimers and limits

The Service is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. Model outputs may be wrong. To the fullest extent the law allows, Teraflock is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, data, or business, and our total liability for anything arising from the Service is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim and one hundred US dollars. You will indemnify Teraflock against third-party claims arising from your use of the Service in breach of these terms.

11. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Delaware and applicable US federal law, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. Talk to us first: most problems are a ledger entry away from resolved. Any dispute that cannot be resolved that way will be brought in the state or federal courts where Teraflock has its principal place of business, and you consent to their jurisdiction.

12. Changes and contact

When these terms change we update the date at the top and, for changes that matter, email account holders before they take effect. Continuing to use the Service after that is acceptance. Questions: hello@teraflock.ai.

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