SternBench Authority Acceptable Use Policy

This Acceptable Use Policy applies to SternBench Authority, including the ChatGPT app and MCP service operated at authority-mcp.sternbench.com.

SternBench Authority is a read-only legal research and authority-retrieval aid. It must be used lawfully, responsibly, and with appropriate professional review.

Acceptable Uses

You may use SternBench Authority to:

• search for legal authorities within the SternBench corpus;
• retrieve citation-friendly case and passage material;
• identify quote-ready passages and paragraph pinpoints;
• test legal propositions against available authority;
• surface limits, caveats, or contrary authority;
• open source links in SternBench Search; and
• support professional legal research and analysis.

Legal Review Required

You must not treat SternBench Authority output as legal advice. You are responsible for verifying all authorities, passages, citations, and propositions against primary/source material and any required citator, good-law, procedural, local-law, or professional-responsibility checks.

You must not claim that an authority is good law, exhaustive, binding, or absent solely because SternBench Authority returned or failed to return it.

Prohibited Uses

You must not use SternBench Authority to:

• provide or rely on legal advice without appropriate lawyer review;
• make automated legal, employment, credit, housing, insurance, immigration, benefits, eligibility, or other high-impact determinations about people without lawful authority and appropriate human review;
• misrepresent outputs as official court records, legal advice from SternBench, or legal advice from ChatGPT;
• scrape, crawl, bulk export, mirror, resell, or redistribute the SternBench corpus or substantial portions of returned authority data;
• reverse engineer, evade, attack, overload, or manipulate the service, ranking, retrieval behavior, source links, authentication, authorization, allowlist, rate limits, or review controls;
• share passwords, one-time codes, tokens, review credentials, or pilot access with unauthorized users;
• submit malicious prompts, payloads, or instructions intended to exfiltrate secrets, reveal hidden system information, bypass safeguards, or disrupt operation;
• use the service to facilitate fraud, evasion, impersonation, unlawful conduct, or misrepresentation;
• use outputs to harass, threaten, defame, or target individuals unlawfully;
• remove, obscure, or misrepresent caveats, source links, or limitations in returned material; or
• violate applicable SternBench, ChatGPT/OpenAI, MCP-client, or identity-provider terms and policies.

Access Controls

SternBench Authority may be limited to authorized pilot, review, or approved accounts. Attempts to bypass, share, sell, or transfer access are prohibited.

We may suspend, limit, or revoke access if we believe use violates this policy, risks harm, threatens service integrity, or conflicts with platform, legal, or review requirements.

Reporting Concerns

If you identify misuse, security concerns, inaccurate source behavior, or potential policy violations, contact:

founder@sternbench.com