> **Version 1.0.0 ｜ Effective 2026-09-20.**
# Tao Terms of Service
**Effective date:** 2026-09-20
**Version:** 1.0.0
These Terms of Service ("**Terms**") are a legally binding agreement between you ("**you**", "**Customer**") and **Infinite Wisdom Software**, a limited liability company ("**Tao**", "**we**", "**us**", "**Provider**"), governing your access to and use of the Tao Service (as defined below). By creating an account, obtaining an API key, or otherwise accessing or using the Service, you agree to these Terms, which take effect when you complete registration and tick your consent (or, if you use the Service without registering, when you first use it). If you do not agree, you may not use the Service.
**If you are accepting these Terms on behalf of an organisation, you represent that you have authority to bind that organisation, and "you" refers to that organisation.**
**IMPORTANT — PLEASE READ CAREFULLY.** These Terms contain a disclaimer of warranties, a limitation of liability, and provisions governing how we may suspend or terminate your access. They also incorporate our [Privacy Policy](/docs/zh-tw/privacy/policy), which describes how we handle data.
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## 1. Definitions
1.1 **"Service"** means the Tao AI capability gateway — a unified API and console that provides access to a set of artificial-intelligence and data capabilities (currently chat, embedding, image, audio, OCR, search and fetch; "**Capabilities**"), metered and billed in Credits.
1.2 **"Input"** means any content, prompt, instruction, file, image, audio, URL, query, parameter or other data you submit to the Service.
1.3 **"Output"** means any content returned to you by the Service, including model responses, generated media, transcriptions, recognition results, search results and fetched pages.
1.4 **"Customer Content"** means Inputs and Outputs. Customer Content never includes our Service components, models, documentation, or the systems and networks used to provide the Service.
1.5 **"Credits"** means the prepaid unit of account used to pay for usage of the Service. Credits are not legal tender; they are non-transferable, may not be gifted to others or exchanged for cash, and may only be used by you (or your account) under these Terms, and may be subject to expiry as posted.
1.6 **"API Key"** means the credential (currently prefixed `sk-tao-`) that authenticates your API calls and is bound to a billing account.
1.7 **"Upstream Provider"** means a third party that provides technical services to us, such as model inference, recognition, search, fetching or infrastructure.
1.8 **"Content"** in the context of fetched pages means the web page, file or other material retrieved from a target URL at your request.
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## 2. Eligibility and Accounts
2.1 You must be at least 18 years old and have full legal capacity to use the Service. The Service is not directed to minors, and we do not knowingly permit minors to register or use the Service.
2.2 You must provide accurate, current and complete registration information, and keep it up to date. You are responsible for all activity under your account and API Keys.
2.3 We may refuse registration, or suspend or terminate any account, in accordance with these Terms, including where we reasonably believe the account is used in breach of these Terms or applicable law.
2.4 **Business and enterprise use.** If you use the Service in a commercial product, you must ensure your own terms, disclosures and consents are consistent with these Terms and our Privacy Policy, and with the terms of any Upstream Provider whose capabilities you expose.
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## 3. The Service; Scope and Restrictions
3.1 **What the Service is.** The Service is an information and AI capability gateway. It routes requests to, and returns results from, AI models and data services — including capabilities fulfilled by us and capabilities fulfilled by Upstream Providers.
3.2 **What the Service is not.** The Service is **not**, and must not be used as, any of the following:
(a) a network access service, internet service, telecommunication service, proxy service, VPN, tunnelling service, or any form of cross-border network channel;
(b) a source of proxy credentials, IP addresses, residential/ISP proxies, or authenticated access;
(c) a means to obtain access to any account, content or area that is protected by credentials, a paywall or other access control.
3.3 **Availability of Capabilities.** Capabilities, models and regions may differ by deployment. For example, the web-fetch Capability may use third-party fetching infrastructure where required. See the [Service documentation](https://docs.yaoagents.com) and our Privacy Policy for details.
3.4 **Changes to the Service.** We may add, modify, deprecate or discontinue any Capability, model or endpoint, and may impose or change usage limits, at any time. We will use reasonable efforts to give notice of material adverse changes where practicable.
3.5 **Beta features.** Features labelled beta, preview, experimental or "coming soon" may be changed or withdrawn at any time and may be excluded from any service commitment.
3.6 **Your environment.** You are responsible for your own equipment, network connectivity, software, API clients, and for adapting your integrations to changes in the Service and its documentation.
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## 4. API Keys, Security and Credentials
4.1 You are responsible for keeping API Keys, passwords, tokens and other credentials confidential and secure. Do not embed API Keys in client-side code or public repositories.
4.2 If you discover any suspected unauthorised access to or use of your account or API Keys, you must immediately revoke the affected API Key in the console and notify us promptly.
4.3 We may rotate, revoke, expire or restrict API Keys in accordance with our security and abuse-prevention policies, including where we detect a security risk or a breach of these Terms.
4.4 Failure to authenticate correctly may result in rate limiting or blocking of the source IP address, as described in the documentation.
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## 5. Acceptable Use and Prohibited Uses
5.1 You may use the Service only in compliance with these Terms, all applicable laws and regulations, and all applicable third-party rights, terms and platform rules (including any Upstream Provider's acceptable-use policy).
5.2 **You represent and warrant that:**
(a) you have all necessary rights, licences and authorisations in respect of every Input, target URL and data set you submit;
(b) your use of the Service complies with all applicable laws and third-party platform rules;
(c) you will not resell, redistribute, sublicense or otherwise make the Service available to third parties except as expressly permitted in writing (see Section 12);
(d) all information you provide is true, accurate and complete; and
(e) you are solely responsible for your Inputs, Outputs and the consequences of using them.
5.3 **Prohibited Uses.** You must not use the Service, and must not permit any third party to use the Service, to:
(a) engage in credential stuffing, brute-force attacks, bulk or fraudulent account registration, or account takeover;
(b) operate ticket bots, rush-buy bots, inventory-hoarding bots or any other automated purchasing that disrupts fair access to goods or services;
(c) commit advertising fraud, click fraud, impression fraud, or generate fake or deceptive traffic;
(d) circumvent login walls, paywalls, authentication, robots instructions or other access controls, or collect non-public data without authorisation;
(e) send spam or unsolicited mass messages, or harvest, scrape, buy or resell personal data in violation of law;
(f) conduct denial-of-service attacks, intrusions, vulnerability scanning, penetration testing or any other activity that harms or burdens networks, systems or services;
(g) collect, generate, store or distribute unlawful, infringing, defamatory, harassing, or sexually exploitative content, or content that facilitates violence or terrorism;
(h) evade access restrictions lawfully imposed by any website, or violate any third party's terms of service, contracts or technical protection measures;
(i) infringe or misappropriate any intellectual-property, privacy, publicity, database or other right;
(j) build, train or improve a competing AI model, gateway or dataset, or use Output to develop products that compete with the Service or any Upstream Provider;
(k) create or use multiple accounts to circumvent limits, promotions, billing obligations or suspensions;
(l) reverse engineer, decompile or attempt to extract the source code or underlying models of the Service, except to the extent permitted by law; or
(m) use the Service for any purpose that violates applicable law or infringes any third party's rights.
5.4 **Additional rules for the fetch Capability.** Because fetching a URL causes us to make a request on your behalf:
(a) you may submit only a single target URL per request; you must not use the Service to mirror a site, recursively crawl a site, or enumerate resources in bulk;
(b) you must not use the Service to access content behind a login, paywall or other authentication measure, or to obtain content that you are not lawfully entitled to access;
(c) you must not attempt to cause the Service to access private, internal, loopback, link-local, metadata or otherwise non-public network resources;
(d) you acknowledge that we may decline, block or rate-limit requests to particular targets, and that the Service identifies itself to target sites as an automated robot where technically possible; and
(e) you acknowledge that we do not guarantee the availability, legality, accuracy or continued accessibility of any target, and that responsibility for whether you may lawfully retrieve and use the target content rests with you.
5.5 **Monitoring and enforcement.** We may, but are not obliged to, monitor, review and log metadata relating to your use of the Service (for example, service, model, quantity, timing, target host and status — **not the content of Inputs, Outputs or fetched pages**), only to the extent necessary and permitted by these Terms and applicable law; you may exercise your personal-data rights under our Privacy Policy. Where we reasonably suspect a breach, we may:
(a) throttle, suspend or require clarification of your use;
(b) request information about your use case and target domains;
(c) suspend or terminate the affected API Key or account, with or without notice, without refund of fees already consumed, with unused prepaid Credits handled under Section 13.4; and
(d) report violations to Upstream Providers and/or competent authorities, and disclose information as required or permitted by law and our Privacy Policy.
5.6 We may update these acceptable-use rules from time to time to reflect legal, security or upstream requirements. Continued use after such an update constitutes acceptance.
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## 6. Customer Content, Ownership and Data Handling
6.1 **You own your content.** As between you and us, you retain all right, title and interest in and to your Inputs and Outputs ("**Customer Content**"). We do not claim any ownership of Customer Content. To the extent any right, title or interest in Outputs might otherwise vest in us, we assign it to you.
6.2 **Your responsibility.** You are responsible for Customer Content and for ensuring it does not violate any law or these Terms. You must not submit personal data of third parties unless you have a lawful basis and all necessary consents or authorisations.
6.3 **Our licence.** You grant us a limited, non-exclusive, worldwide licence to host, process, transmit and display Customer Content **solely** as necessary to provide, secure and support the Service and to comply with law. This licence does not permit us to use Customer Content for marketing, for training or improving AI models, or for sale to third parties.
6.4 **No-retention commitment.** We do not store the content of your Inputs or Outputs. Customer Content is processed transiently, in memory or in passing, for the purpose of fulfilling your request and returning the result, and is not written to our databases, object storage, backups or analytics systems. We do not use Customer Content to train or improve AI models, to build datasets, or for our own product development. Our logs record metadata only (as described in Section 5.5). See our [Privacy Policy](/docs/zh-tw/privacy/policy) for the categories of metadata and account data we do retain and why.
6.5 **Legal compulsion and security.** We may be required by law, or by a valid legal order, to preserve or disclose information in our possession. Because we do not store Customer Content, in most cases we will have no Customer Content to disclose; we may, however, preserve and disclose the metadata and account information described in our Privacy Policy.
6.6 **Outputs may not be unique.** AI outputs may be similar or identical for different users. Our assignment in Section 6.1 does not extend to other users' output, and we make no representation that Outputs are unique, accurate or free of third-party rights.
6.7 **AI limitations.** Outputs are probabilistic, may be inaccurate, incomplete, biased or fabricated, and must not be relied upon as professional advice (legal, medical, financial, tax or otherwise). You are responsible for human review before relying on any Output.
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## 7. Upstream Providers and Third-Party Models
7.1 The Service makes available Capabilities supplied by Upstream Providers. Upstream Providers are independent entities that supply their models and services; we make no warranty as to their models, services, availability or accuracy, but we supervise their processing activities as required by applicable law.
7.2 When we forward Inputs to an Upstream Provider to fulfil your request, that provider's terms, privacy policy and retention practices apply to the extent it processes the Input. We select providers with appropriate safeguards where reasonably available, but we cannot guarantee the retention, use or security practices of any Upstream Provider. **You should review the applicable Upstream Provider terms before submitting sensitive Inputs.**
7.3 We may change, add or remove Upstream Providers at any time. Our Privacy Policy describes the types of Upstream Providers; the specific list is available on request at [email protected].
7.4 Where a Capability is fulfilled by our own infrastructure, our no-retention commitment in Section 6.4 applies fully to that processing.
7.5 We may determine whether a Capability is fulfilled by us or by a third party, and may route between different channels. In all cases, we do not store Customer Content.
7.6 You release us from, and hold us harmless against, claims arising from your use of any Upstream Provider Capability, to the maximum extent permitted by law.
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## 8. Fees, Credits and Billing
8.1 **Credits and pricing.** Usage is metered and charged in Credits at the rates published in the console, the catalog endpoint or a separate order form. Prices may change from time to time; we will use reasonable efforts to give notice of material changes. Prices are exclusive of taxes unless stated.
8.2 **Prepaid balance and pre-authorisation.** Paid requests may be pre-authorised (a hold) up to an estimated upper bound before the request is sent upstream, and settled for actual usage afterwards. If an upper bound cannot be estimated, or if available Credits are insufficient, the request may be refused (for example with HTTP 402 or 503).
8.3 **Metering and failed requests.** Failed requests that do not reach an Upstream Provider, and requests rejected by local validation, are generally not charged. Where a request has reached an Upstream Provider and usage has been incurred, it may be charged, based on the usage actually incurred, even if it later fails or you cancel or disconnect — including, for example, where you abort a long-running generation.
8.4 **Gift and promotional Credits.** Gift, sign-up, invitation and promotional Credits may be subject to additional conditions, may not be withdrawable or refundable, and may expire. They may be reclaimed in the event of abuse.
8.5 **Payment.** Where you purchase Credits, payment is processed by a third-party payment processor (currently **Stripe** on the International deployment). We do not store full payment-card details. Your payment is also subject to the processor's terms and privacy policy. You authorise us and the processor to charge your chosen payment method.
8.6 **Taxes.** You are responsible for all applicable taxes, duties and levies in connection with your use of the Service, other than taxes on our net income.
8.7 **Refunds.** Except where required by applicable law or expressly stated at purchase, Credits and fees are non-refundable; if you are a consumer, your statutory refund rights are not limited by these Terms. We may, in our discretion, issue refunds or Credits for service failures. Suspected fraudulent or abusive charges may be reversed.
8.8 **Billing disputes.** You must raise a billing dispute within 30 days of the charge, with reasonable supporting detail. We will investigate in good faith.
8.9 **Suspension for non-payment.** We may suspend or terminate the Service if amounts due are not paid.
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## 9. Intellectual Property; Feedback
9.1 We and our licensors retain all right, title and interest in and to the Service, including software, models, documentation, interfaces, trademarks, and all improvements. No rights are granted except as expressly stated in these Terms.
9.2 You may not remove or obscure proprietary notices, or use our trademarks without prior written permission, except for fair, factual references.
9.3 If you voluntarily provide feedback, suggestions or ideas, you agree that we may use them to improve the Service, without compensation to you. We do not thereby acquire any rights in your Customer Content; any personal data in your feedback is handled under our Privacy Policy. We will not publicly identify you without your consent.
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## 10. Confidentiality
10.1 Each party may receive confidential information from the other. The receiving party will protect it with reasonable care and use it only to perform these Terms, except where disclosure is required by law or agreed in writing.
10.2 Customer Content that you designate as confidential is treated as confidential by us and is subject to the no-retention commitment in Section 6.4.
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## 11. Disclaimers; Limitation of Liability; Indemnity
11.1 **Disclaimer.** To the maximum extent permitted by law, the Service is provided "**as is**" and "**as available**", without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, accuracy, availability, or uninterrupted or error-free operation. We do not warrant any Output, any Upstream Provider, or any target website content.
11.2 **Limitation of liability.** To the maximum extent permitted by law, we will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for loss of profits, revenue, data, goodwill or business opportunity, arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service. Our aggregate liability will not exceed the amount you paid us for the Service in the one (1) month preceding the event giving rise to the claim.
11.3 **Indemnity by you.** You will indemnify, defend and hold harmless us and our affiliates, directors, officers, employees and agents from and against any claims, actions, losses, liabilities and reasonable costs (including legal fees) arising out of or relating to the following, to the extent caused by your breach, unlawful act or fault and having a causal connection to your conduct; where you are a consumer, this Section does not require you to assume liability beyond what the law provides:
(a) your Customer Content;
(b) your breach of these Terms, in particular the Prohibited Uses;
(c) your use of the Service in violation of law or third-party rights;
(d) any claim by a third party relating to content you obtain or use through the Service; or
(e) your products or services that integrate the Service.
11.4 **Force majeure.** We are not liable for failure or delay caused by events beyond our reasonable control. To the extent force majeure prevents performance, liability is exempted in whole or in part as the law provides; if force majeure defeats the purpose of these Terms, either party may terminate. The affected party must notify the other promptly and provide evidence.
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## 12. Integrators and Resellers
12.1 If you integrate the Service into your own product or service, or make it available to end users, you must:
(a) ensure that your and your end users' use of the Service complies with these Terms, in particular the Prohibited Uses;
(b) remain responsible to us for the consequences of any breach of these Terms arising from that use; and
(c) not resell the Service as a proxy or network-access service, or claim that your product is endorsed by us or identical to the Service.
12.2 Any reseller, OEM or white-label arrangement requires our prior written agreement.
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## 13. Suspension and Termination
13.1 You may stop using the Service and close your account at any time, subject to payment of outstanding amounts.
13.2 We may suspend or terminate your access, in whole or in part, where (except in urgent cases, clear illegality or to prevent further harm, we will give you a reasonable period to remedy):
(a) you breach these Terms;
(b) we are required to do so by law or by an Upstream Provider;
(c) your use creates a security, legal or operational risk; or
(d) we discontinue the Service.
Where practicable, we will give advance notice for terminations other than for breach.
13.3 On termination: your right to use the Service ends; Sections that by their nature should survive (including ownership, no-retention, disclaimers, liability and indemnity) survive.
13.4 On termination for breach, we may refund unused prepaid Credits after deducting amounts already consumed and actual losses caused by your breach, unless applicable law provides otherwise.
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## 14. Compliance and Disclosure
14.1 You must comply with all applicable laws, including sanctions and anti-corruption laws. You represent that you are not located in, or organised under the laws of, a comprehensively sanctioned jurisdiction, and that you are not a restricted party.
14.2 We may disclose information (including account and usage metadata) to Upstream Providers, regulators, courts or law-enforcement authorities where required or permitted by law, or to investigate suspected abuse, as further described in our Privacy Policy.
14.3 **Fetch and third-party rights.** You acknowledge that a target website may object to retrieval of its content, and that claims by third parties relating to your fetching or use of content are your responsibility. We may cooperate with lawful requests from target websites or authorities concerning suspected abuse.
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## 15. Changes to These Terms
15.1 We may amend these Terms from time to time. Material changes will be notified by posting on the website, by email, or through the console a reasonable period in advance where required by law, and we will prominently highlight terms of material interest to you. If you do not agree, you may stop using the Service and close your account before the effective date, and we will refund unused prepaid Credits under Section 13.4. Continued use after the effective date constitutes acceptance. The version in effect when you accepted these Terms, and the version of any subsequent acceptance, is recorded against your account.
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## 16. General
16.1 **Entire agreement.** These Terms and the documents incorporated by reference (including the Privacy Policy) are the entire agreement between the parties on their subject matter.
16.2 **Assignment.** You may not assign these Terms without our written consent. We may assign them to an affiliate or in connection with a merger, acquisition or sale of assets; we will give you notice, and if you object within 30 days of that notice you may terminate these Terms and we will refund unused prepaid Credits under Section 13.4.
16.3 **Notices.** Notices to you may be given by email or through the console and are deemed delivered on the date sent to your registered email or posted in the console; notices to us must be sent to [email protected].
16.4 **Severability; waiver.** If a provision is unenforceable, the remainder stays in effect. Failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver.
16.5 **No third-party beneficiaries**, except that Upstream Providers may enforce provisions relating to their Capabilities.
16.6 **Interpretation.** If any provision of these Terms has more than one interpretation, it will be interpreted in favour of the non-drafting party (you); if a standard term is inconsistent with a negotiated term, the negotiated term prevails.
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## 17. Contact
**Infinite Wisdom Software**
Contact: [email protected]
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*Summary of the no-retention principle (non-binding): Your Inputs and Outputs belong to you. We process them only to deliver your request. We do not store their content, do not use them to train models or build datasets, and do not sell them. We keep only the metadata and account data needed for billing, security and legal compliance, as described in our Privacy Policy.*
Tao Terms of Service
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