SternBench Authority Service Terms

These Service Terms apply to SternBench Authority, including the ChatGPT app and MCP service operated at authority-mcp.sternbench.com.

SternBench Authority is operated by 1577750 B.C. Ltd., doing business as SternBench.

By using SternBench Authority, you agree to these Service Terms and any other SternBench terms that apply to your access. If you are using SternBench Authority through ChatGPT, your use of ChatGPT is also governed by the terms and policies applicable to your ChatGPT or OpenAI account.

Service Description

SternBench Authority is a read-only legal research and authority-retrieval service. It helps authorized users search the SternBench authority corpus, retrieve citation-friendly authority records, locate quote-ready passages, test legal propositions, identify limits or caveats, and open source links in SternBench Search.

SternBench Authority does not create, edit, send, post, delete, or modify user files, court records, public records, third-party systems, or external accounts.

Access and Availability

SternBench Authority may be made available to authorized pilot users, review users, and other approved users through ChatGPT Developer Mode, ChatGPT app review flows, or MCP-compatible clients. Public ChatGPT availability depends on OpenAI app review and publication.

We may limit, suspend, or revoke access to protect the service, comply with law or platform requirements, investigate misuse, enforce allowlists, or maintain reliability.

Do not share review, pilot, or account credentials with unauthorized users. Do not attempt to bypass authentication, authorization, allowlist, rate-limit, or review controls.

Legal Research Aid Only

SternBench Authority is a legal research aid. It is not legal advice. It does not create an attorney-client relationship. It is not a substitute for review by a qualified lawyer.

The service is not a full citator, not a complete appellate-history service, not a complete negative-treatment service, and not a complete good-law review. Returned authorities, passages, citations, and summaries may be incomplete, outdated, misranked, or inapplicable to your facts or jurisdiction.

You are responsible for checking all authorities, passages, paragraph pinpoints, citations, and legal propositions against the underlying source material and any required citator, procedural, local-law, or professional-responsibility checks before relying on them.

Permitted Use

You may use SternBench Authority to conduct lawful legal research, retrieve source-linked authority material, test legal propositions, and support professional legal analysis, subject to these Service Terms and applicable law.

You must use the service only for purposes consistent with its read-only legal research design.

Prohibited Use

You must not:

• use SternBench Authority as a substitute for lawyer review where professional judgment is required;
• represent that an output is legal advice from SternBench or from ChatGPT;
• claim that the absence of a returned authority proves that no authority exists;
• use outputs to make automated legal, employment, credit, housing, insurance, immigration, or other high-impact determinations about people without appropriate human review and lawful authority;
• scrape, bulk export, mirror, resell, or redistribute the SternBench corpus or substantial portions of returned authority data;
• reverse engineer, attack, overload, or attempt to manipulate ranking, retrieval, authentication, or access-control behavior;
• bypass or attempt to bypass account, allowlist, rate-limit, review, or geographic controls;
• share credentials, one-time codes, tokens, or review accounts with unauthorized users;
• submit malicious prompts, code, payloads, or instructions intended to exfiltrate data, reveal secrets, override system safeguards, or disrupt service operation;
• use the service to facilitate fraud, evasion, impersonation, unlawful activity, or misrepresentation; or
• use SternBench Authority in a way that violates applicable OpenAI, ChatGPT, MCP-client, or SternBench policies.

Source Links and Third-Party Client Surfaces

SternBench Authority may return links to SternBench Search source pages. Those source pages are provided to help you verify authorities and passages. If you access SternBench Authority through ChatGPT or another client, that client may present, summarize, transform, or display results according to its own interface and policies.

SternBench is not responsible for independent terms, policies, or processing by third-party client surfaces except as required by applicable law or agreement.

Changes, Suspension, and Errors

We may update, suspend, limit, or discontinue SternBench Authority or any feature at any time. We may correct errors, change retrieval behavior, update source data, add or remove tools, or change access requirements.

The service may produce incomplete, unavailable, or erroneous results. If you encounter a material error, contact founder@sternbench.com.

No Warranty

SternBench Authority is provided on an "as is" and "as available" basis, to the maximum extent permitted by law. We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, complete, current, or suitable for any particular legal matter, jurisdiction, filing, transaction, or client purpose.

Limitation of Liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, SternBench will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost revenues, lost data, or professional liability arising from use of or inability to use SternBench Authority.

Nothing in these Service Terms limits liability that cannot legally be limited.

Contact

For access, support, or legal questions about SternBench Authority, contact:

founder@sternbench.com