Legal

Terms of Service

These Terms of Service (“Terms”) govern your access to and use of ProgressPals (the “Service”) operated by ProgressPals (“we”, “us”, or “our”). By creating an account or using the Service in any way, you agree to be bound by these Terms.

Effective date: May 19, 2026.
Last updated: May 19, 2026.
Version: 1.0.

EXPERIMENTAL SOFTWARE NOTICE. ProgressPals is experimental, alpha-stage software. It may produce incorrect outputs, suffer outages without warning, expose your IP address to other peers in your swarm, transmit decrypted prompts to the first peer in a chain, lose data, or change behavior incompatibly between releases. You use the Service entirely at your own risk. If you are not comfortable with these characteristics, do not use the Service.

1. Acceptance of Terms

By accessing the website at progresspals.com, creating an account, installing the pals command-line interface (“CLI”), running a swarm, joining a swarm operated by another user, or otherwise using any feature of the Service, you acknowledge that you have read, understood, and agree to be legally bound by these Terms and our Privacy Policy, which is incorporated by reference. If you do not agree to any part of these Terms, you may not use the Service.

If you are accepting these Terms on behalf of a company, organization, or other legal entity, you represent that you have the authority to bind that entity to these Terms, and the words “you” and “your” refer to that entity.

2. Eligibility

You may use the Service only if you (a) are at least 18 years old, (b) are not barred from using the Service under the laws of the United States or any other applicable jurisdiction, (c) are not located in a country subject to a U.S. Government embargo, or that has been designated by the U.S. Government as a “terrorist supporting” country, and (d) are not listed on any U.S. Government list of prohibited or restricted parties. By using the Service, you represent and warrant that you meet all of these requirements.

The Service is not directed to children under 18. If we learn we have collected personal information from a child under 18, we will delete that information.

3. Description of the Service

ProgressPals provides a system for small groups of users to pool their personal computer hardware over the internet to run large open-source artificial intelligence models in a distributed fashion. The Service consists of (i) a website used for account creation and management; (ii) a backend that records swarm metadata, manages invite tokens, and enforces a per-swarm peer allow-list; and (iii) a command-line interface (the pals CLI) that runs on your own hardware and communicates with other users’ hardware via libp2p.

The actual AI inference workload runs on hardware controlled by you and other users — not on hardware we control. We do not host AI models, store user prompts, store user outputs, or run inference for you. We provide the coordination layer that lets you and people you invite cooperate.

4. Account Registration and Security

To create or manage a swarm (act as an “Operator”), you must register an account on our website. Joining a swarm operated by someone else (acting as a “Joiner”) does not require an account — only an invite token issued by the Operator.

You agree to (a) provide accurate, current, and complete information during registration; (b) maintain the security of your password and any access tokens issued to you; (c) promptly notify us of any unauthorized access to your account; and (d) be responsible for all activities that occur under your account, including all actions of any peers you invite or your CLI performs while authenticated as you.

You acknowledge that your access tokens (including the PROGRESSPALS_SUPABASE_ACCESS_TOKEN and PROGRESSPALS_SUPABASE_REFRESH_TOKEN values shown on your account dashboard) function as credentials. Anyone who obtains them may act as you on the Service. You are solely responsible for the confidentiality of these tokens.

5. Acceptable Use

You agree NOT to:

Use the Service to violate any applicable law, regulation, court order, or third-party right (including intellectual property, privacy, or publicity rights).
Use the Service to generate, distribute, or amplify illegal content, including (but not limited to) child sexual abuse material (CSAM), content depicting non-consensual sexual acts, content that incites violence against any group, or content constituting unlawful harassment or defamation.
Use the Service to generate or distribute malware, ransomware, phishing pages, or other malicious code; to attempt to gain unauthorized access to any system; or to conduct cyberattacks of any kind.
Use the Service to circumvent any third-party AI provider’s terms of service, model license, content moderation, or rate limits.
Invite to your swarm, or accept an invite from, any person you have not personally verified — see Section 6 for why this matters.
Run, knowingly join, or operate any swarm that exists to bypass applicable export controls, sanctions, or any other government restriction on the movement of compute or model weights.
Attempt to reverse-engineer the Service’s backend, de-anonymize other users, intercept activations of other swarms, forge invite tokens, or otherwise compromise the Service or any other user.
Mint, sell, or transfer invite tokens to third parties as a commercial product without our prior written consent.
Use any automated means to access the Service in a manner that sends more requests to the backend than a reasonable human could send manually, except via the CLI in its intended operation.
Use the Service to train, fine-tune, or otherwise improve any model owned by a competitor of any AI lab whose model weights you have not licensed.

We may, in our sole discretion and without prior notice, suspend or terminate any account, revoke any access token, kick any peer, or shut down any swarm that we reasonably believe is violating these rules.

6. Peer-to-Peer and Distributed Inference Risks

ProgressPals is fundamentally a peer-to-peer system. By using it, you acknowledge and accept the following:

6.1. Your IP address is exposed to other peers

Connections between peers are direct (or NAT-traversed via libp2p). Any user in a swarm you join or operate can observe the IP address(es) and network metadata of other peers in that swarm. We do not relay or proxy peer-to-peer traffic.

6.2. The first peer sees your decrypted prompts

To execute transformer inference, the peer that runs the first layer of the model must decrypt your input. This is a property of how transformer inference works, not a flaw in our software, and no amount of client-side cryptography can change this without a hardware enclave. Only invite and accept invites from people you would trust to read your prompts.

6.3. Activations between subsequent peers are encrypted, not perfect

Activation tensors between peers (after the first) are encrypted under AES-256-GCM with a key derived from your swarm’s shared secret. This is best-effort protection against passive observation by intermediate peers. It does not protect against: (a) the first peer in the chain (see 6.2); (b) any peer who has legitimately obtained your swarm secret; (c) operating-system level attacks by anyone with administrator access to a peer’s machine; (d) side-channel attacks; or (e) any future cryptographic break of AES-256-GCM or HKDF-SHA256.

6.4. You are responsible for the conduct of pals you invite

When you mint an invite token and share it with someone, you are adding them to your swarm. If they misuse the Service (Section 5), submit harmful prompts, or violate these Terms, we may suspend or terminate your account in addition to or instead of theirs.

6.5. We do not pre-screen peers

We do not perform background checks, identity verification, or content moderation on peers, prompts, or outputs. The trust model is your responsibility.

7. Experimental Status; No SLA

The Service is experimental. We make no commitment to uptime, performance, durability, or backward compatibility. Specifically:

The Service may be unavailable, slow, or unreliable.
Features may be added, changed, removed, or charged for at any time without notice.
Data including but not limited to swarm metadata, invite tokens, peer credentials, and account records may be lost, corrupted, or deleted at any time.
The CLI may contain bugs that crash, hang, leak memory, or produce incorrect results.
Encryption keys, secrets, or auth tokens may be compromised due to bugs we have not yet discovered.
We may discontinue the Service entirely with or without notice.

8. Intellectual Property; Open-Source Licenses

The ProgressPals service, website, brand, and any proprietary components are owned by us. The CLI source code is published under the Apache License, Version 2.0; you may use it in accordance with that license. Use of the CLI under Apache 2.0 does not grant you any license to use our trademarks, service marks, or trade dress.

The CLI incorporates open-source components governed by their own licenses, including but not limited to MIT-licensed components. The license files for those components are included in the installed package. You agree to comply with the terms of those licenses.

You retain all ownership of any prompts you submit and any outputs produced. We claim no license, copyright, or other rights in your prompts or outputs.

9. Privacy

Your use of the Service is also governed by our Privacy Policy, which describes what information we collect, how we use it, and your rights with respect to that information.

10. DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTIES

THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE,” WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, WHETHER EXPRESS, IMPLIED, STATUTORY, OR OTHERWISE. TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, WE EXPRESSLY DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES INCLUDING (WITHOUT LIMITATION) IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, QUIET ENJOYMENT, ACCURACY, AND ANY WARRANTY ARISING OUT OF COURSE OF DEALING OR USAGE OF TRADE. WE DO NOT WARRANT THAT THE SERVICE WILL MEET YOUR REQUIREMENTS, BE UNINTERRUPTED, TIMELY, SECURE, OR ERROR-FREE, OR THAT ANY DEFECTS WILL BE CORRECTED. WE DO NOT WARRANT THE ACCURACY, RELIABILITY, OR COMPLETENESS OF ANY MODEL OUTPUT, ANY ENCRYPTION, ANY PEER’S CONDUCT, OR ANY DATA STORED OR TRANSMITTED. YOU ASSUME ALL RISK ARISING FROM YOUR USE OF THE SERVICE.

11. LIMITATION OF LIABILITY

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, IN NO EVENT WILL WE (INCLUDING OUR OFFICERS, DIRECTORS, EMPLOYEES, AGENTS, AFFILIATES, AND LICENSORS) BE LIABLE TO YOU OR TO ANY THIRD PARTY FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES — INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION DAMAGES FOR LOST PROFITS, LOST REVENUE, LOST OR CORRUPTED DATA, LOSS OF GOODWILL, BUSINESS INTERRUPTION, COMPUTER FAILURE OR MALFUNCTION, OR THE COST OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES — ARISING OUT OF OR RELATED TO YOUR USE OF, OR INABILITY TO USE, THE SERVICE, REGARDLESS OF THE LEGAL THEORY (CONTRACT, TORT, STATUTORY OR OTHERWISE) AND EVEN IF WE HAVE BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. WITHOUT LIMITING THE FOREGOING, OUR TOTAL CUMULATIVE LIABILITY TO YOU FOR ANY CLAIM ARISING FROM OR RELATED TO THE SERVICE WILL NOT EXCEED THE LESSER OF (A) THE AMOUNT YOU HAVE PAID US IN THE TWELVE MONTHS PRECEDING THE CLAIM, OR (B) ONE HUNDRED U.S. DOLLARS (USD $100). FOR USERS WHO HAVE PAID US NOTHING (FOR EXAMPLE, BECAUSE THE SERVICE IS OFFERED FREE OF CHARGE), THE CAP IS USD $100. MULTIPLE CLAIMS WILL NOT EXPAND THIS LIMIT. SOME JURISDICTIONS DO NOT ALLOW THE EXCLUSION OR LIMITATION OF INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES, SO PORTIONS OF THIS LIMIT MAY NOT APPLY TO YOU; IN SUCH JURISDICTIONS OUR LIABILITY IS LIMITED TO THE GREATEST EXTENT ALLOWED BY LAW.

11.1. Scenarios this limit covers

For clarity, the limitation of liability in Section 11 applies to, among other things, the following scenarios:

A peer in your swarm reads, retains, or publishes a prompt you submitted.
A peer in your swarm produces a malicious, harmful, or copyright-infringing output and that output reaches a third party.
Your IP address is observed by another peer and used in a way you did not consent to.
An invite token, swarm secret, peer credential, or access token is leaked, intercepted, or compromised.
The encryption between peers is broken, downgraded, or proves inadequate.
A bug in the CLI corrupts your local config, exposes a secret, crashes during inference, or produces incorrect outputs.
The Service goes offline, loses your account data, or terminates without notice.
A third-party model whose weights are loaded by the swarm produces output that infringes any third party’s rights.
Hardware contributed to a swarm is damaged through use of the Service.
You suffer reputational, professional, financial, or any other harm as a result of any swarm activity.

12. Indemnification

You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless us and our officers, directors, employees, agents, and affiliates from and against any and all claims, damages, obligations, losses, liabilities, costs, debts, and expenses (including but not limited to attorneys’ fees) arising from (a) your use of and access to the Service; (b) your violation of these Terms; (c) your violation of any third-party right, including any intellectual property, privacy, or publicity right; (d) any prompt, output, or other content you generate, store, or transmit via the Service; (e) any conduct by a peer you invited or accepted an invite from; or (f) any allegation that your use of the Service caused damage to a third party. This defense and indemnification obligation will survive these Terms and your use of the Service.

13. Termination

You may stop using the Service at any time. You may delete your account by contacting us (see Section 18).

We may suspend or terminate your account, your access tokens, any invite tokens you have minted, or your participation in any swarm at any time, with or without cause and with or without notice, including for any reason we believe is necessary to protect the Service, other users, or third parties.

Upon termination, the provisions of these Terms that by their nature should survive (including Sections 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12, 15, 16, 17, and 18) will continue in full force.

14. Modifications to the Service and to These Terms

We may modify or discontinue any feature of the Service at any time, with or without notice. We may also revise these Terms from time to time. If we make material changes, we will update the “Last updated” date at the top of this page and, where we have a contact email for you, attempt to notify you by email. Your continued use of the Service after a revised version of the Terms takes effect constitutes your acceptance of those revised Terms. If you do not agree to the revised Terms, you must stop using the Service.

15. Governing Law

These Terms and any dispute arising out of or related to them or the Service will be governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, United States of America, without regard to its conflict-of-laws principles. The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply.

16. Dispute Resolution; Arbitration; Class-Action Waiver

Please read this section carefully — it affects your legal rights.

16.1. Informal resolution first

Before filing any claim against us, you agree to first contact us at the email address in Section 18 and attempt to resolve the dispute informally for at least 60 days.

16.2. Binding arbitration

If informal resolution fails, you and we agree that any dispute, claim, or controversy arising out of or related to these Terms or the Service will be settled by binding arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association in accordance with its Consumer Arbitration Rules, by a single arbitrator, in the English language. The seat of arbitration will be Wilmington, Delaware. Judgment on the arbitration award may be entered in any court of competent jurisdiction.

16.3. Class-action waiver

YOU AND WE AGREE THAT ANY DISPUTE WILL BE BROUGHT IN YOUR OR OUR INDIVIDUAL CAPACITY ONLY, AND NOT AS A PLAINTIFF OR CLASS MEMBER IN ANY PURPORTED CLASS, COLLECTIVE, REPRESENTATIVE, OR PRIVATE-ATTORNEY-GENERAL PROCEEDING. The arbitrator may not consolidate more than one person’s claims and may not preside over any form of representative or class proceeding.

16.4. Opt-out

You may opt out of this arbitration agreement by emailing us at the address in Section 18 within 30 days of first accepting these Terms, with the subject line “Arbitration Opt-Out”.

16.5. Exceptions

Either party may bring an individual action in small-claims court rather than arbitration. Either party may also seek injunctive or other equitable relief in a court of competent jurisdiction to protect its intellectual property rights.

17. Severability; No Waiver; Assignment

If any provision of these Terms is held invalid or unenforceable, that provision will be severed and the remaining provisions will remain in full effect. No failure or delay by us in exercising any right under these Terms will operate as a waiver of that right. You may not assign or transfer these Terms or any rights under them without our prior written consent; we may freely assign these Terms.

18. Entire Agreement; Contact

These Terms (including the documents incorporated by reference) constitute the entire agreement between you and us regarding the Service and supersede all prior or contemporaneous agreements, proposals, or representations, whether written or oral.

Questions about these Terms? Contact us at progresspals@gmail.com.

By clicking “Create account” on the signup form you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to these Terms and our Privacy Policy.