Isn't this practically every TOS though?
Nearly every TOS I've ever read has a "We can ban you for any reason, or no reason, are under no obligation to disclose any reason." line somewhere in it.
HN's for example
> We reserve the right, at our sole discretion, to change or modify portions of these Terms of Use at any time.
> You acknowledge that Y Combinator may establish general practices and limits concerning use of the Site,
> You further acknowledge that Y Combinator reserves the right to change these general practices and limits at any time, in its sole discretion, with or without notice.
> Y Combinator reserves the right to investigate and take appropriate legal action against anyone who, in Y Combinator’s sole discretion, violates this provision, including without limitation, removing the offending content from the Site, suspending or terminating the account of such violators and reporting you to the law enforcement authorities.
> Isn't this practically every TOS though?
Not even close. Even OpenAI and Anthropic aren't bad enough that they claim literal ownership of your inputs and outputs.
> HN's for example
You're not paying to use HN. Getting banned here has essentially zero consequences.
If Z.ai uses its absolute powers to ban you because you wrote a review about them or something, then you lose actual money. This is especially relevant if you're looking to take advantage of their discounted yearly payment option.
Consider the reputation implications of them banning someone who can get their complaint about it to the front page of HN and into the YouTube drama loop. They’d get swarmed with activist cancellations.
At most I suspect the A.I. providers will just come up with yellow banners like Anthropic did where naughty smut writers get put in the time out corner.
> Even OpenAI and Anthropic aren't bad enough that they claim literal ownership of your inputs and outputs.
Where do you see this?
> You're not paying to use HN.
Oh for sure man, this absolutely looks like you were only concerned and talking about paid services:
> Broad and perpetual license over inputs and outputs, and even your name and profile picture.
The post I was replying to wasn't talking about that, but sure, let's consider it.
Everything I post here is public, and it's just relatively low value commentary anyway. It doesn't matter if Y Combinator has rights to it. Arguably they actually need to assert some rights, otherwise they wouldn't be able to transfer copies of copyrighted comments to other visitors of the site. HN's terms are probably too broad for their purposes but it doesn't really matter much because this is just a forum.
AI on the other hand is for actual work, both public and private. There are actual economic implications here, so the stakes are much higher. I absolutely want to own the inputs and the outputs I paid money for.
> Even OpenAI and Anthropic aren't bad enough that they claim literal ownership of your inputs and outputs.
In this case you are placing your trust in OpenAI and Anthropic. I'm not sure about Anthropic but OpenAI has changed their mission corpus quite a lot from its humble beginnings that it results hard to trust them when they say they don't use your stuff to further train their models. If I'm a Big Corp with enough lawyers to putnup a fight, I would then feel ok with such clause, but being a small guy, who is going to defend me when the truth comes out that they have been training their models with my data? Similar fiasco as with Facebook, who had claimed they didn't sell your data, even though they were.
That's where I'm coming from with all this "trust us, we don't train our models with your data". At least this Chinese company is being upfront about it.
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This is not uncommon.
Also, it only applies to their chat offering, not the api. OpenRouter also offers the API with ZDR.
While shitty, i’d say that its really not that special.
???
None of the major LLM chat providers (ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, and I just confirmed this) claim rights over your input.
They also don't claim rights over your output, but because of how copyright law might apply, they explicitly assign all the rights to the generated output.
Not just that but, even if they wanted to claim ownership of the output, courts in the US have deemed that copyright cannot be assigned to machine-generated output.
So yeah, happy to take a look at a counter-example if you have one (aside from GLM 5.3, obv.).
> In choosing to submit, create, generate, record, post, or display Inputs on or through the Service, you grant an irrevocable, perpetual, transferable, sublicensable, royalty-free, and worldwide right to SpaceXAI to use, copy, store, modify, process, adapt, transmit, distribute, reproduce, publish, upload, download, display in public forums, list information regarding, make derivative works of, and distribute such Content, including anything referenced therein, in any and all media or distribution methods now known or later developed, for any purpose, and to aggregate your User Content and derivative works thereof for any purpose, including but not limited to: (i) maintain and provide the Service; (ii) improve our products and the Service and for our other business purposes, such as data analysis, customer and market research, developing new products or features, or identifying or displaying usage or User Content trends; and (iii) perform such other actions to enforce these Terms, comply with our Privacy Policy, comply with applicable law or governmental, court, and law enforcement requests or requirements or keep our Service safe.
> To the extent the User Content includes a person’s image, likeness, voice, or other similar attributes, you grant SpaceXAI the same rights to use those attributes as part of the User Content as described above. You represent and warrant that you have obtained all rights, licenses, notices, permissions, and consents necessary for SpaceXAI to use that User Content.
https://x.ai/legal/terms-of-service
These are arguably even worse to be honest. Absolute nightmare.
Nice find, those are indeed pretty bad.
However, if we check the market share of generative AI providers, ChatGPT+Claude+Gemini make up around 88%; while Grok is 2-4% depending on who you ask.