Alethic Terms of Service

Last updated: August 13, 2026

1. Agreement to these terms

These Terms of Service ("Terms") are a binding agreement between you and Alethic Inc. ("Alethic", "we", "us", or "our") governing your use of the Alethic platform at tryalethic.com and platform.tryalethic.com, and the Alethic add-ins for Microsoft Word and Google Docs (together, the "Service"). By creating an account or using the Service, you agree to these Terms and to our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

If you use the Service on behalf of an organization, you represent that you are authorized to bind that organization, and "you" includes that organization.

2. What Alethic does

Alethic helps you check whether the claims in an academic manuscript are supported by their cited sources. You upload a manuscript or paste text, and the Service extracts claims, retrieves the cited papers from public academic sources, compares each claim against its source, and returns per-claim verdicts and an overall integrity score.

The Service produces automated, AI-generated assessments. These assessments are informational aids, not authoritative or final determinations. See Section 9.

3. Eligibility and accounts

  • You must be at least 18 years old and able to form a binding contract.
  • You are responsible for the accuracy of your account information and for keeping your credentials secure.
  • You are responsible for all activity under your account. Notify us promptly of any unauthorized use.
  • We may grant, limit, suspend, or revoke access at our discretion.

4. Credits, payment, and refunds

  • The Service operates on a credit system. New accounts may receive a number of free trial credits, which we may change or discontinue at any time.
  • Verifications consume credits based on the processing they require. We display pricing and package options in the Service.
  • Payments are processed by Stripe. By purchasing credits you also agree to Stripe's terms. You authorize us to charge your selected payment method.
  • Refunds are handled on a case-by-case basis and are at our discretion, except where a refund is required by applicable law. Credits have no cash value, are not transferable, and do not expire.
  • We may change prices prospectively. Price changes do not affect credits already purchased.

5. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

  • Upload content you do not have the right to submit, or that infringes the rights of others, including copyright or confidentiality obligations.
  • Upload content you are not permitted to disclose to our third-party processors (see the Privacy Policy, Section 5).
  • Use the Service, our outputs, or our confidential information to build a competing product, or scrape, copy, or resell our outputs at scale.
  • Attempt to reverse engineer, disrupt, overload, or circumvent the security, rate limits, or access controls of the Service.
  • Use the Service for any unlawful purpose, or to process content that is illegal to possess or share.
  • Misrepresent Alethic output as a human peer review, an accreditation, or an official certification.

We may suspend or terminate access for violations.

6. Your content and your rights

  • You keep your content. You retain all rights to the manuscripts and text you upload. We do not claim ownership of your content.
  • License to operate. You grant Alethic a limited license to host, process, transmit, and display your content solely to provide the Service to you. This includes sending content to the sub-processors described in the Privacy Policy. This license ends when you delete the content or close your account, except for copies retained as required by law or in routine backups for a limited period.
  • No training on your content. We do not use your manuscripts, or anything derived from them, to train or improve any artificial-intelligence model, ours or a third party's, and our AI processing provider is contractually held to the same limitation. We treat the confidentiality of your unpublished research as a primary obligation.

7. Alethic's intellectual property

The Service, including its software, models, prompts, design, and content we provide (but excluding your content), is owned by Alethic and protected by intellectual-property laws. We grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable license to use the Service in accordance with these Terms. You may use the reports we generate for you for your own research, editorial, and academic purposes.

8. Third-party services

The Service depends on third-party providers (including the AI, infrastructure, payment, and academic-source providers listed in the Privacy Policy). We are not responsible for third-party services, and your use of them may be subject to their own terms. The cited papers retrieved by the Service are the property of their respective rights holders and are provided for verification purposes.

9. Disclaimers (please read)

  • The Service is provided "as is" and "as available," without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement, to the fullest extent permitted by law.
  • Automated verification can be wrong. The Service uses AI models that can produce incorrect, incomplete, or misleading results, including flagging a correctly cited claim as problematic (a false positive) or failing to flag a genuinely unsupported claim (a false negative). Verdicts and scores are probabilistic aids, not statements of fact.
  • Not a substitute for human judgment. You must independently review and verify any output before relying on it. The Service does not replace peer review, editorial review, professional advice, or your own scholarly diligence. Do not make publication, funding, personnel, integrity, or other consequential decisions solely on the basis of Alethic output.
  • Availability. We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, secure, or error-free, and we may modify or discontinue features at any time.

10. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law:

  • Alethic will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for any loss of reputation, opportunity, or profits, arising out of or related to your use of the Service.
  • Alethic's total liability for any claim arising out of or related to the Service will not exceed the greater of (a) the amount you paid Alethic in the twelve (12) months before the event giving rise to the claim, or (b) one hundred Canadian dollars (CAD 100).
  • The exclusions and cap above do not apply to liability for fraud, gross negligence, or willful misconduct, or to a breach by Alethic of its confidentiality and security obligations regarding your manuscripts.
  • Some jurisdictions do not allow certain limitations, so some of the above may not apply to you. Nothing in these Terms limits or excludes liability that cannot be limited or excluded under applicable law, including non-waivable rights under consumer-protection law (such as Ontario's Consumer Protection Act, 2002) and under applicable data-protection law (such as PIPEDA and, where it applies, the GDPR).
  • If any limitation in this section is held unenforceable, it will be reduced to the maximum limitation permitted by law rather than struck entirely, and the remaining provisions stay in effect.

11. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify and hold Alethic harmless from third-party claims, damages, and expenses (including reasonable legal fees) arising from (a) your content, (b) your use of the Service in violation of these Terms, or (c) your violation of any law or third-party right. This indemnity does not apply to claims to the extent they arise from the Service's own output or from Alethic's breach of these Terms or of applicable law.

12. Termination

You may stop using the Service and close your account at any time. We may suspend or terminate your access if you violate these Terms, if required by law, or if we discontinue the Service. On termination, your right to use the Service ends. Sections that by their nature should survive (content licenses already granted, IP, disclaimers, limitation of liability, indemnification, and governing law) survive termination.

13. Changes to these terms

We may update these Terms. If we make a material change, we will notify you by email or through the Service before it takes effect, where required. Continued use after a change means you accept the updated Terms.

14. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Province of Ontario and the federal laws of Canada applicable there, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules. Disputes will be resolved in court, not by mandatory arbitration. To the extent permitted by law, the courts located in Ottawa, Ontario will have exclusive jurisdiction, and you consent to that venue. Nothing here prevents you from bringing a matter before a small-claims court or a consumer-protection authority where applicable law gives you that right.

15. Miscellaneous

  • These Terms, with the Privacy Policy, are the entire agreement between you and Alethic regarding the Service.
  • If any provision is found unenforceable, the rest remains in effect.
  • Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver.
  • You may not assign these Terms without our consent. We may assign them in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets.

16. Contact

Alethic Inc., incorporated under the federal laws of Canada The Entrepreneurship Hub, 150 Louis-Pasteur Private, STEM Complex, Room 122, Ottawa, Ontario, K1N 6N5, Canada Email: [email protected]