Terms of Service

Last Updated: May 23, 2026

These Terms of Service ("Terms") form a binding agreement between you ("you," "your," "User," or "Customer") and Zerith LLC, a limited liability company organized under the laws of the State of Wyoming, United States ("Zerith," "we," "us," or "our"), governing your access to and use of the laobai.dev website, the API gateway available at api.laobai.dev, the user console, and all related services (collectively, the "Service").

By creating an account, generating an API key, or otherwise accessing or using the Service, you acknowledge that you have read, understood, and agree to be bound by these Terms and by our Privacy Policy, which is incorporated by reference. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

If you are using the Service on behalf of a company or other organization, you represent that you have authority to bind that entity to these Terms, and "you" refers to that entity.

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1. Description of the Service

Zerith operates an AI API gateway. The Service proxies and routes your API requests to third-party upstream AI model providers (including, without limitation, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepSeek, Alibaba (Qwen), Mistral, Meta (Llama), and Cohere) and returns their responses to you through a unified, OpenAI-compatible and Anthropic-compatible interface.

We do not create, own, train, host, or control the underlying AI models. We are a routing and aggregation layer. The models, their availability, their behavior, their pricing inputs, and their outputs are determined by the respective upstream providers. We may add, remove, rename, re-route, or change the availability of any model at any time, including in response to changes made by an upstream provider.

The Service does not include, and we are not responsible for, any third-party product, model, cloud platform, payment channel, or service that you access through or alongside the Service. Such third parties may impose their own terms, usage policies, regional restrictions, and pricing, and their acts, omissions, outages, content filtering, model retirements, or price changes may affect the Service.

2. Eligibility

You must be at least 18 years old and capable of forming a binding contract to use the Service. The Service is not directed to, and may not be used by, anyone under 18. The Service is intended for development and commercial use and is not a consumer product.

You may only use the Service in countries and regions where it is lawfully available, and you may not use it if you, or any entity that controls you, are subject to applicable sanctions or are located in a sanctioned or embargoed jurisdiction. You are responsible for compliance with all export-control, sanctions, and local laws applicable to your use.

3. Accounts and API Keys

• Registration. You must provide accurate and complete information when you register and keep it current. You are responsible for all activity that occurs under your account.
• API keys. API keys authenticate requests to the Service and are secrets. You are solely responsible for keeping your API keys confidential. Do not share, publish, embed in client-side code, or otherwise expose your keys. You are responsible for all usage and charges incurred under your keys, whether or not authorized by you.
• Security. Notify us immediately at support@laobai.dev if you suspect any unauthorized use of your account or keys. We are not liable for losses arising from your failure to safeguard your credentials.
• One account. You may not create accounts by automated means, maintain multiple accounts to evade limits, quotas, suspensions, or pricing, or register on behalf of anyone other than yourself or an entity you are authorized to represent.

4. Acceptable Use

You agree not to use the Service, and not to permit any end user or downstream recipient of your access to use the Service, to do any of the following. This Acceptable Use Policy applies to all access to the Service, including via any authorized resale or pass-through access.

4.1 Unlawful, harmful, and abusive use. You may not:

• violate any applicable law or regulation, or infringe or misappropriate any third party's intellectual property, privacy, or other rights;
• generate, solicit, or distribute child sexual abuse material (CSAM) or any content that sexually exploits or endangers minors;
• create or facilitate malware, ransomware, exploits, botnets, denial-of-service attacks, or other means of compromising the security, integrity, or availability of any computer, network, or system;
• develop, design, or facilitate weapons, including chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, or high-yield explosive weapons, or autonomous weapons systems;
• incite or promote violence, terrorism, self-harm, harassment, or hateful conduct against individuals or groups;
• engage in fraud, scams, phishing, impersonation, deceptive or predatory practices, or the generation of disinformation intended to deceive;
• conduct unlawful surveillance, social scoring, biometric identification of individuals in public or private spaces without consent, or other prohibited law-enforcement or rights-violating activities;
• compromise the privacy of others, including unlawfully collecting, processing, or disclosing personal or sensitive data.

4.2 Output handling and high-risk uses. AI outputs may be inaccurate, incomplete, biased, or otherwise unreliable. You are solely responsible for evaluating outputs before relying on or distributing them. If you use the Service in connection with high-risk domains — including legal, medical, financial, employment, housing, insurance, education/admissions, journalism, or other consequential decisions about individuals — you must implement appropriate human review, and you must disclose to your end users that they are interacting with AI and that outputs may be false or incomplete. Outputs are not professional, legal, medical, or financial advice.

4.3 Platform abuse. You may not:

• attempt to circumvent, disable, or interfere with rate limits, quotas, usage-based metering, billing, or other protective or security features of the Service;
• probe, scan, penetration-test, reverse engineer, decompile, or attempt to discover the source code, internal routing, system prompts, or upstream credentials of the Service, except to the extent this restriction is prohibited by law;
• use the Service or its outputs to train, fine-tune, distill, benchmark, or otherwise develop a competing AI model or a competing API gateway, or to systematically scrape, harvest, or extract model behavior or weights;
• resell, redistribute, sublicense, or provide pass-through access to the Service to third parties without our prior written permission;
• impose an unreasonable or disproportionately large load on the Service, or use the Service in any manner that could disable, overburden, or impair it.

4.4 Upstream provider policies. Each request you send is forwarded to an upstream provider and is also subject to that provider's terms and usage policies. You are responsible for complying with the applicable upstream provider's policies. We may block, filter, or refuse any request or output to comply with an upstream provider's requirements or to protect the Service.

We may, at our discretion and without liability, monitor for, investigate, restrict, filter, modify, suspend, or terminate access in connection with suspected violations of this Section 4.

5. Fees, Credits, and Billing

• Prepaid balance. The Service is offered on a prepaid, usage-based basis. You purchase a balance ("Credits"), which is consumed as you use the Service, generally metered by the number of tokens processed and the model used, according to the rates published on our pricing page.
• Pricing. Prices and consumption rates are set out on our pricing and model pages and may be updated from time to time. Material rate changes will take effect prospectively after we post them. Your continued use after a change constitutes acceptance of the updated rates. Credit values are denominated in U.S. dollars; the actual amount charged by your payment provider may vary by payment method and currency.
• Payment. Payments are processed by third-party payment processors. We do not receive or store your full payment card number. You authorize us and our processors to charge your selected payment method for the amounts you purchase.
• Taxes. Stated prices are exclusive of taxes. You are responsible for all applicable taxes, duties, and similar charges, other than taxes based on our net income.
• No guarantee of value. Credits have no cash value except as expressly required by law, are not transferable, and are not a deposit or stored-value instrument.

6. Refund Policy

All purchases are reviewed on a case-by-case basis. Except where a non-waivable right under applicable law requires otherwise:

• Consumed Credits are non-refundable. Credits or fees that have already been used are not eligible for refund.
• No refunds for change of intent. We may decline refunds requested because you have decided to stop using the Service, change plans, or no longer need the balance.
• No refunds for violations. Credits associated with an account that has been restricted, suspended, or terminated for violating these Terms or the Acceptable Use Policy are non-refundable, and any remaining balance is forfeited.
• Review and verification. All refund requests are subject to review. We may require proof of payment and identity verification, and the receiving account must match the verified payer. Refunds within ninety (90) days of payment are returned to the original payment method where possible; after ninety (90) days, refunds may be issued by an alternative method to an identity-matched account.
• Anti-fraud / AML review. Refund requests are subject to fraud and anti-money-laundering review. We reserve the right of final interpretation of this Refund Policy and may decline requests we reasonably believe to be fraudulent or abusive.

7. Service Availability

The Service is provided on an "as is" and "as available" basis. We do not guarantee that the Service will be uninterrupted, timely, secure, or error-free, and we do not warrant the accuracy, reliability, or completeness of any model output obtained through the Service.

A substantial part of the Service depends on third-party upstream providers and infrastructure. We are not responsible or liable for upstream provider outages, latency, rate limiting, content filtering, model deprecations, errors, or changes, and any such event does not entitle you to a refund of consumed Credits. We may perform maintenance, impose or change rate limits and quotas, or modify, suspend, or discontinue any part of the Service at any time.

8. Data and Privacy

Our collection and use of information is described in our Privacy Policy. In summary, and as further detailed there:

• We log request metadata (such as model, token counts, timestamps, status, and source IP) for billing, security, abuse-prevention, and operational purposes.
• Depending on configuration, the content of your API requests and responses (prompts and completions) may be logged and retained for a limited period to operate, debug, secure, and prevent abuse of the Service, and to comply with law and upstream provider requirements.
• To fulfil your requests, the content of your requests is forwarded to the relevant upstream AI provider, where it is subject to that provider's own terms and privacy practices.

You are responsible for ensuring that you have the necessary rights and consents to send any data (including any personal or confidential data) through the Service, and for not submitting data you are not permitted to disclose.

8.1 Optional Data Sharing Program. We offer an optional, opt-in Data Sharing Program described in our Privacy Policy. If — and only if — you affirmatively enable the Program (by checking the separate, unticked Data Sharing box during registration or by enabling it in your console settings) and route requests through the discounted "data-sharing" model group, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license to reproduce, process, de-identify, and disclose the content of those requests and responses to third parties, and to permit those third parties to use it, in order to train, evaluate, and improve machine-learning models. In exchange, you receive discounted pricing on that model group. Participation is entirely voluntary, is separate from and not required for your acceptance of these Terms, and may be withdrawn at any time in your console settings; however, content already shared with third parties before you withdraw cannot be recalled, deleted, or unwound, and the license granted above is irrevocable with respect to such already-shared content. The Program is not available to, and may not be enabled by, users located in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, or Brazil.

8.2 Your warranties for shared content. If you participate in the Program, you represent and warrant that, for all content you route through the data-sharing model group, you hold all rights, consents, and authority necessary to permit the de-identification, disclosure, and use described in Section 8.1; that such content does not contain personal information of third parties that you are not authorized to share, trade secrets or confidential information of others, or material whose disclosure would violate any law, regulation, or contract; and that your participation does not breach any obligation you owe to a third party. Your indemnification obligations in Section 13 apply in full to all content you submit to the Program.

9. Intellectual Property

• Our property. The Service, including the gateway, console, website, software, and our trademarks and branding, is owned by Zerith or its licensors and is protected by intellectual property laws. We grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable license to access and use the Service in accordance with these Terms. No other rights are granted.
• Your inputs. As between you and us, you retain whatever rights you have in the content you submit to the Service ("Inputs").
• Outputs. As between you and us, we do not claim ownership of the outputs returned to you. Outputs are generated by upstream providers and your rights in them, and any restrictions on their use, are governed by the applicable upstream provider's terms. We make no representation that outputs are unique or non-infringing.
• Feedback. If you give us suggestions or feedback, you grant us a perpetual, royalty-free license to use it without restriction.

10. Suspension and Termination

• By you. You may stop using the Service and close your account at any time. Voluntary termination does not entitle you to a refund of any remaining or consumed balance except as required by law or expressly stated in Section 6.
• By us. We may suspend, restrict, filter, or terminate your access (in whole or in part, with or without notice) if we reasonably believe you have violated these Terms or the Acceptable Use Policy; if required to manage security, fraud, or attack risk; if an upstream provider suspends or restricts a service we rely on; or if required by law. We may also terminate for convenience on reasonable notice.
• Effect. On termination, your license to use the Service ends and your API keys are revoked. Sections that by their nature should survive (including Sections 4, 6, 7, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15) survive termination.

11. Disclaimer of Warranties

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, THE SERVICE AND ALL CONTENT AND OUTPUTS ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE," WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, WHETHER EXPRESS, IMPLIED, OR STATUTORY, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. WE DO NOT WARRANT THAT THE SERVICE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, SECURE, OR ERROR-FREE, OR THAT ANY OUTPUT WILL BE ACCURATE, RELIABLE, OR FIT FOR YOUR PURPOSES. WE MAKE NO WARRANTIES REGARDING ANY THIRD-PARTY PROVIDER, MODEL, OR SERVICE.

12. Limitation of Liability

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, IN NO EVENT SHALL ZERITH LLC, ITS MEMBER, OR ITS AFFILIATES, SUPPLIERS, OR LICENSORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR ANY LOSS OF PROFITS, REVENUE, DATA, USE, GOODWILL, OR OTHER INTANGIBLE LOSSES, WHETHER OR NOT WE HAVE BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES, ARISING FROM OR RELATED TO THE SERVICE, INCLUDING ANY MODEL OUTPUT OR THE ACTS OR OMISSIONS OF ANY UPSTREAM PROVIDER.

OUR TOTAL AGGREGATE LIABILITY FOR ALL CLAIMS ARISING FROM OR RELATED TO THE SERVICE SHALL NOT EXCEED THE GREATER OF (A) THE TOTAL AMOUNTS YOU PAID TO US IN THE TWELVE (12) MONTHS IMMEDIATELY PRECEDING THE EVENT GIVING RISE TO THE CLAIM, OR (B) ONE HUNDRED U.S. DOLLARS (US$100).

SOME JURISDICTIONS DO NOT ALLOW CERTAIN LIMITATIONS, SO SOME OF THE ABOVE MAY NOT APPLY TO YOU; IN THAT CASE, OUR LIABILITY IS LIMITED TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW.

13. Indemnification

You will defend, indemnify, and hold harmless Zerith LLC and its member, affiliates, and personnel from and against any claims, damages, liabilities, losses, and expenses (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of or related to: (a) your Inputs or the data you submit through the Service; (b) your use of the Service or any output; (c) your violation of these Terms, the Acceptable Use Policy, applicable law, or any upstream provider's terms; or (d) your violation of any third party's rights.

14. Dispute Resolution; Governing Law

• Governing law. These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Wyoming, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules.
• Informal resolution. Before filing any claim, you agree to first contact us at legal@laobai.dev and attempt to resolve the dispute informally in good faith for at least thirty (30) days.
• Binding arbitration. Except for claims that may be brought in small-claims court and claims for injunctive relief relating to intellectual property or unauthorized use, any dispute arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service shall be resolved by final and binding arbitration administered under the rules of a recognized arbitration provider, conducted in English. Judgment on the award may be entered in any court of competent jurisdiction.
• Class-action waiver. You and we agree that claims may be brought only in an individual capacity and not as a plaintiff or class member in any purported class, collective, or representative proceeding. You and we waive any right to a jury trial.
• Venue. To the extent any dispute is not subject to arbitration, the state and federal courts located in Wyoming shall have exclusive jurisdiction, and you consent to personal jurisdiction there.

15. General

• Changes to these Terms. We may update these Terms from time to time. We will update the "Last Updated" date and, for material changes, provide reasonable notice (such as by email or an in-console notice). Your continued use of the Service after changes take effect constitutes acceptance.
• Force majeure. We are not liable for any failure or delay caused by events beyond our reasonable control, including upstream provider failures, internet or infrastructure outages, acts of government, or natural disasters.
• Assignment. You may not assign these Terms without our consent. We may assign these Terms in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets.
• Severability. If any provision is held unenforceable, the remaining provisions remain in full force, and the unenforceable provision will be modified to the minimum extent necessary.
• No waiver. Our failure to enforce any provision is not a waiver of our right to do so later.
• Entire agreement. These Terms and the Privacy Policy constitute the entire agreement between you and us regarding the Service and supersede any prior agreements.

16. Contact

Questions about these Terms may be sent to:

Zerith LLC (operator of laobai.dev) Email: legal@laobai.dev