Terms of Service

1. What this agreement covers

These Terms govern your access to and use of OpenBrief — the open-source-intelligence collection, assessment, and briefing product at this domain, including the marketing site, the console at /app/*, and the underlying API. "OpenBrief," "we," "us," and "our" refer to the operator of this product. "You" refers to the person or organization creating an account. By creating an account, signing in, or using any part of the console, you agree to these Terms and to the Privacy Policy, which is incorporated by reference.

If you're accepting on behalf of an organization (a Team workspace), you're representing that you have authority to bind that organization, and "you" includes that organization.

2. What OpenBrief is — and isn't

OpenBrief monitors public-record and public-post sources you configure (companies, people, domains, keywords, and standing global themes), caches what it finds, and — where you enable it — uses a large-language-model call to write an analytic assessment from that already-collected material. It is a working tool for analysts, not an authority. Specifically:

• Generated "Key Judgments," confidence levels, risk tiers, and estimative-probability language are the model's or the product's own read of the material it was given — estimative, not certain, and only as good as the public sources feeding them. OpenBrief is instructed to synthesize only from real, already-collected evidence and never to invent facts, but no automated system is infallible, and you are responsible for independently verifying anything before it goes into a deliverable to your own customer, prime contractor, or agency.
• OpenBrief is not legal, investment, immigration, security-clearance, or law-enforcement advice, and nothing it produces should be treated as such.
• OpenBrief aggregates and displays public information; it does not itself verify the underlying accuracy of any third-party source (news outlets, government datasets, social platforms) it draws from.

3. Accounts

You need a real account — an email address and a password — to use the console. You're responsible for keeping your login credentials confidential and for everything that happens under your account. Tell us right away if you believe your account has been compromised. You must be at least 18 years old and able to form a binding contract to create an account.

OpenBrief is built around shared team workspaces ("organizations"), not solo silos. When you sign up without an invite, you become the owner of a new organization; when you redeem a teammate's invite, you join their existing one as a member. Everyone in the same organization can see the same tracked watchlist, notes, briefs, judgments, indicators, and RFIs — that's the intended, disclosed behavior of a shared workspace, not a bug. Don't invite someone to your workspace who shouldn't see what your team is tracking.

4. Access and payment

As of this writing, OpenBrief does not run self-serve, in-app billing. Paid access is granted after a manual request (the "Request access" links on the pricing section) and arranged directly between you and us — by invoice, agreement, or another method we agree on outside the app. The prices shown on the marketing site are indicative, not a binding quote, until confirmed in writing. If and when self-serve subscription billing ships inside the product, this section will be updated to name the real payment processor and its own terms before that flow goes live — we won't silently start charging cards under this paragraph as written today.

We can suspend or terminate access for non-payment on a paid arrangement, consistent with whatever payment terms you separately agreed to.

5. Acceptable use

OpenBrief is built for lawful, unclassified analytic use. You agree not to:

• Use it to stalk, harass, dox, or unlawfully surveil a specific private individual;
• Submit, upload, or attempt to process classified or export-controlled information through it;
• Attempt to circumvent rate limits, cache controls, or the API-key gating on optional sources (ACLED, ReliefWeb, OpenCorporates, Reddit, X) other than with credentials you're actually entitled to use;
• Scrape, resell, or redistribute the aggregated output of OpenBrief's collection layer as a standalone data product, separate from your own analytic work product built on top of it;
• Use the console to violate the terms of service of any of the underlying public sources it queries on your behalf (see the Privacy Policy's source list) — you remain bound by those platforms' own rules for anything you do beyond OpenBrief's own server-side collection;
• Interfere with or attempt to disrupt the service, probe it for vulnerabilities without authorization, or introduce malicious code.

We can suspend or terminate an account for a real, good-faith violation of this section.

6. Your content

You own what you create in OpenBrief — your watchlist entries, notes, Key Judgment resolutions, RFIs, and Case Files ("Your Content"). You grant us a license to store, process, and (where you use an AI-assisted feature) transmit Your Content as needed to actually run the product — including sending tracked-subject names and already-collected material to Anthropic's API to generate written analysis, as described in the Privacy Policy. We don't use Your Content to train any model, and we don't sell it.

If your organization's account is deleted, Your Content is handled per the retention and deletion terms in the Privacy Policy.

7. Our intellectual property

OpenBrief — the software, design, product name, and mark — belongs to us. These Terms don't grant you any rights to it beyond the ability to use the console as intended for your own team's work. Don't copy, reverse-engineer, or build a competing product from the console's non-public implementation.

8. Disclaimer of warranties

OpenBrief is provided "as is" and "as available." We don't warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that any source — ours or a third party's — will always be reachable or current (a background job that can't reach GDELT, Resend, or Anthropic degrades honestly with a plain "unavailable" state rather than pretending otherwise, but that unavailability is still a real possibility you should plan around). To the maximum extent the law allows, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement.

9. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent the law allows, OpenBrief and its operator will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or any loss of profits, revenue, data, or goodwill, arising from your use of — or inability to use — the service, even if advised of the possibility. Our total liability for any claim arising from these Terms or the service is capped at the greater of (a) the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim arose, or (b) $100.

Nothing in this section limits liability where the law doesn't allow it to be limited (for example, liability for our own gross negligence or willful misconduct, where applicable).

10. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify and hold us harmless from any claim, loss, or expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising from your violation of these Terms, your misuse of the service, or Your Content — except to the extent the claim arises from our own breach of these Terms.

11. Termination

You can stop using OpenBrief and request account deletion at any time from the Settings page or by emailing hello@openbrief.io. We can suspend or terminate your access for a real violation of Section 5, non-payment on an agreed paid arrangement, or if required by law. On termination, your right to use the service ends immediately; data handling follows the retention and deletion terms in the Privacy Policy.

12. Dispute resolution and arbitration

Most concerns can be resolved by emailing us first, and we ask that you try that before anything formal. If a dispute can't be resolved informally within 30 days, you and we agree that it will be resolved by binding individual arbitration rather than in court, except that either party may bring an individual claim in small-claims court if it qualifies, and either party may seek injunctive relief in court for actual or threatened infringement of intellectual property or unauthorized access to the service. Arbitration will be administered by a recognized arbitration organization (e.g., AAA or JAMS) under its consumer or commercial arbitration rules, as applicable, before a single arbitrator, with judgment on the award enterable in any court of competent jurisdiction.

Class action waiver: disputes will be brought only in an individual capacity, not as a plaintiff or class member in any purported class, collective, or representative proceeding.

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, without regard to conflict-of-laws principles (jurisdiction to be confirmed by counsel — placeholder pending legal review, per the notice at the top of this page).

13. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms as the product changes — most recently to describe a real feature accurately, not to quietly take away a right you had. We'll update the "Last updated" date above when we do. Continued use of OpenBrief after a change takes effect means you accept the updated Terms.

14. Contact

Questions about these Terms: hello@openbrief.io.