Terms of Service

Last updated: April 14, 2026

1. Acceptance of terms

By accessing or using OpenThread (the "Service"), you agree to be bound by these Terms of Service. If you do not agree, you may not use the Service. These Terms incorporate by reference our Privacy Policy and our Data Security page.

2. Description of the Service

OpenThread is a platform for sharing, discussing, and discovering AI conversation threads from providers such as Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Cursor, Windsurf, and others. The Service includes a web application, browser extensions, IDE extensions, a CLI, and associated APIs that let users share AI conversations and engage with a community.

3. User accounts

You may need to create an account to use certain features. You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your account credentials and for all activity that occurs under your account. Email verification is required before you can sign in.

You agree to provide accurate information when creating your account and to update it as necessary. You agree not to share your account, impersonate another user, or create accounts to evade enforcement actions taken against an existing account.

The Service is not directed at children under 13. Do not create an account if you are under 13. See the Privacy Policy §11 for parental contact information.

4. User-generated content

You retain ownership of the AI conversation threads, posts, comments, and other content you share on OpenThread. By posting content, you grant OpenThread a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to display, distribute, index, reformat, cache, and promote your content within and in connection with the Service, including in social previews and search results.

Following account deletion, your contributions may be retained on the platform in anonymized or de-authored form so that conversations and rankings other users participated in remain intact. See the Privacy Policy §9 for what this looks like in practice.

You agree not to post content that:

Violates any applicable laws or regulations
Infringes the intellectual property rights of others
Contains malicious code, malware, spam, or deceptive content
Harasses, threatens, defames, or incites violence against others
Contains the private or sensitive personal information of others
Contains sexual content involving minors
Contains operational secrets (API keys, private keys, passwords) — note that we automatically redact many such patterns before storage, but you remain responsible for what you share

5. AI conversation data

AI conversations shared on OpenThread originate from third-party AI providers. OpenThread does not control or take responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or reliability of AI-generated content.

You are responsible for ensuring you have the right to share any AI conversation you post, in accordance with the terms of service of the originating AI provider.

6. Community guidelines and moderation

OpenThread includes community features such as voting, commenting, community creation, and moderation. Communities may set their own rules in addition to these Terms. Community moderators may remove content, restrict membership, or take other actions within their communities at their discretion. Platform staff may suspend or terminate access to the Service at any time for violations of these Terms or for any reason consistent with applicable law.

7. Skills, templates, and the marketplace

OpenThread allows users to publish skills and templates and to install, rate, and review them. Reviews you write are publicly attributed to your username. We may flag, hide, or remove skills, templates, or reviews that violate these Terms or community guidelines, or that are reported as harmful, deceptive, or unsafe.

8. Browser and IDE extensions

OpenThread publishes browser and IDE extensions that let you share AI conversations from supported provider sites and editors. Extensions only access conversation data on pages or files you explicitly choose to share. They do not collect general browsing history or monitor activity on unrelated websites or projects. Use of the extensions is subject to these Terms and to any additional terms presented during installation.

9. Intellectual property and source-visibility

The hosted Service, the OpenThread name, the OpenThread logo, the visual design, and the branding are owned by OpenThread. All rights are reserved. Nothing in these Terms grants you any right to use the OpenThread name, logo, or branding in your own products or services without prior written permission.

Source-visible, not open source. The OpenThread source code is published in a public repository so that anyone can read it and verify the security and privacy claims made on the Data Security page. The source code is governed by the LICENSE file in that repository, which reserves all rights and grants no license to copy, modify, distribute, host, or offer a derivative service. Reading the source for personal study and conducting good-faith security research against your own local instance are expressly permitted by the LICENSE.

You may not reverse-engineer the hosted Service, decompile or extract proprietary algorithms from it, or use the Service to train a competing AI model or competing platform. The good-faith security-research carve-out in the next section overrides this restriction within its stated scope.

10. Acceptable use and automated access

You agree not to:

Scrape, crawl, or extract content from the Service except via documented APIs and in accordance with their published rate limits
Access the Service through automated means (bots, scripts, headless browsers) for purposes other than your own personal use, security research permitted under section 11, or use of the documented APIs
Interfere with, disrupt, or impose an unreasonable load on the Service or the infrastructure that supports it
Attempt to bypass authentication, authorization, rate limiting, or any other security control
Use the Service to send unsolicited messages, advertise, or promote external products in violation of community rules
Use the Service to train an AI model or build a derivative dataset without our express written permission

11. Security research safe harbour

We welcome good-faith security research. If you are testing OpenThread under the conditions described in SECURITY.md in our repository — limited to your own account and your own local instance, respecting rate limits, not accessing other users' data, and reporting issues through GitHub's private vulnerability reporting — we will not pursue legal action against you for that activity, and the restrictions in sections 9 and 10 do not apply within that scope. Please read the full safe-harbour terms in SECURITY.md before testing.

12. Copyright complaints (DMCA)

If you believe content on OpenThread infringes your copyright, you may submit a takedown notice to the operator of this instance. Your notice should include:

A description of the copyrighted work you claim has been infringed and a URL or identifier for the original work
The URL of the OpenThread post, comment, or other item you want removed
Your full legal name, postal address, telephone number, and email address
A statement that you have a good-faith belief that the use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law
A statement, made under penalty of perjury, that the information in your notice is accurate and that you are the copyright owner or authorized to act on the owner's behalf
Your physical or electronic signature

Submit takedown notices through the operator contact channel listed on the About page or by opening an issue in our GitHub repository marked "DMCA". We may forward the contents of your notice (including your contact information) to the user who posted the content. We may terminate the accounts of users who repeatedly infringe. If your content is removed and you believe the removal is mistaken, you may submit a counter-notice through the same channel.

13. Termination

We may suspend or terminate your access to the Service at any time, with or without cause and with or without notice. Upon termination, your right to use the Service ceases immediately. You may delete your account at any time through your account settings; account deletion is described in detail in the Privacy Policy §9 and is not reversible.

14. Disclaimers

The Service is provided "as is" and "as available" without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. OpenThread does not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, error-free, secure, or free of harmful components. Use of the Service is at your own risk.

15. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, OpenThread and its operators shall not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for any loss of profits, data, use, goodwill, or other intangible losses, arising from your use of or inability to use the Service.

16. Governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the jurisdiction in which the operator of this instance is established, without regard to conflict-of-laws principles. The operator's jurisdiction is published on the About page or available on request. Any disputes arising from these Terms or your use of the Service shall be resolved in the courts of that jurisdiction, unless mandatory consumer-protection law in your country of residence provides otherwise.

17. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. Continued use of the Service after changes are posted constitutes acceptance of the revised Terms. We will notify users of material changes through the Service.

18. Contact

If you have questions about these Terms, please reach out through the OpenThread community or open an issue on our GitHub repository. For security issues, follow the disclosure process in SECURITY.md.