Terms of Service

These terms cover the self-serve beta of Anvil Cloud — the hosted service at anvilcontrol.ai, the @useanvil/sdk package, and the anvil command-line tool. They are written to be read, not skimmed past.

If your organisation has a signed Master Services Agreement with us, that agreement governs and these terms fill gaps only where it is silent.

The short version

Anvil is free during beta, and it never becomes a bill on its own. No card, no automatic conversion, and at least 30 days' notice before paid plans exist.
There is no SLA during beta. We publish a status page instead of a number we have not earned.
Anvil is not a guarantee. It reduces duplicate and out-of-policy execution; it does not eliminate it. Section 2 is the most important thing in this document — read it before you put Anvil on your money path.
You own your code, your data, and your policies. We do not train models on them and we do not build cross-customer datasets from them.
Your keys are yours to guard. We store them as hashes and cannot recover them, so rotate rather than ask.
Either of us can walk away. If we stop providing it, we help you export your decision records.
Our liability is capped and the cap is real. During a free beta it is limited to what you have paid us, which is nothing. Section 10 says so plainly instead of hiding it.

The detail below controls, and it is written to be read.

1. What you are agreeing to

By creating a workspace, redeeming an invite, installing the SDK or CLI, or calling the hosted API, you agree to these terms. If you are doing that on behalf of a company, you are confirming you have authority to bind it.

Anvil is in beta. It is free during beta, and public hosted accounts can sign up themselves. Deliberately restricted deployments may require an invitation. You will not be charged automatically, and beta access does not convert to a paid plan on its own: when paid plans exist we will give you at least 30 days' notice, and nothing is billed until you have chosen a plan and accepted it. If you do not choose one, your access ends or continues on whatever free terms we then offer — it does not turn into an invoice.

Anvil is provided by Henry Miller, an individual trading as Anvil, in San Francisco, California. We have not incorporated an operating entity yet; when we do, it will be named here and it will assume these terms. Notices to us go to henry@anvilcontrol.ai.

2. What Anvil is — and what it is not

Anvil is a control layer. You wrap a risky call — a payout, a refund, a deletion, an outbound message — and Anvil evaluates your policy, suppresses duplicates, records what happened, and can block, delay, or require approval.

Anvil is not a guarantee, and the most important thing in this document is that you understand what that means before you put it on your money path.

2.1 You keep responsibility for your own systems

Anvil sits beside your code; it does not replace it. Testing, backups, your provider's own safeguards, monitoring, reconciliation, human review, and legal compliance all remain yours. If Anvil is the only thing standing between an agent and a material or irreversible loss, that is a design you should change.

2.2 Software that controls high-risk actions can itself cause loss

Concretely, Anvil may:

permit an action that should have been blocked;
block or delay an action that should have been permitted;
fail to identify a duplicate, or treat two distinct actions as duplicates;
misclassify data or misread policy intent;
produce an incomplete or incorrect report; or
return an unknown or degraded outcome.

2.3 No exactly-once guarantee

Anvil is designed to reduce duplicate and out-of-policy execution. It does not guarantee exactly-once execution, duplicate prevention, successful execution, complete recovery, or any particular business outcome. Distributed systems, third-party providers, network failures, process crashes, configuration, the idempotency key you choose, lease expiry, and race conditions can all produce duplicate, blocked, conflicting, delayed, failed, or unknown results.

An "unknown" result can mean a downstream provider accepted your action even though we never received or durably recorded the confirmation. Reconcile with that provider before you retry, and before you tell anyone the action failed.

2.5 Ghost mode does not enforce

In ghost or observation mode the real underlying action still executes every time. Anvil only records what it *would* have done in enforce mode. Ghost results can be incomplete, and they do not prove what happened in an external system. Moving to enforcement is a deliberate act you take after review.

2.6 Availability behaviour is a choice you make

Depending on your configuration, an outage or a dependency failure may fail closed and block an action, fail open and permit it without some protections, apply a graceful fallback, or return an unknown result. Choosing and validating the right behaviour for each action is your call, and you should make it before the outage rather than during it.

2.7 Approvals do not verify authority

Approval and maker-checker features route a decision to a person. They do not verify that the person has legal, financial, or organisational authority to make it. Approver identity, authority, context, and judgement are yours.

2.8 Generated and AI-assisted output is a draft

Policy imports, log analysis, suggested rules, generated code, risk scores, impact estimates, and avoided-loss figures are probabilistic or estimated. They may be wrong. They are drafts for your review, they are not legal or compliance advice, and no generated enforcement behaviour takes effect until you review, test, and activate it.

2.9 Sensitive-data detection is not comprehensive DLP

Detection and redaction cover documented patterns, classes, payload sizes, and destinations. They will miss personal data, credentials, health information, payment information, and anything deliberately obscured. Do not represent them to anyone as comprehensive.

3. Your account

You are responsible for your API keys, your workspace members, and everything done with your credentials. Keys are stored as hashes and cannot be recovered — rotate rather than recover. Tell us promptly at henry@anvilcontrol.ai if you believe a key or an account has been compromised.

You must be able to form a binding contract, and you may not use Anvil if we have previously terminated your access.

4. What you may do

Use Anvil in your own applications, in development and in production, subject to these terms.
Install and run the SDK and CLI, including the anvil protect codemod against your own source.
Submit your own logs, configuration, and policies for analysis.
Build on the API for your own use.

5. What you may not do

You may not, and may not let anyone else:

use Anvil unlawfully, or to violate someone else's rights;
submit logs, code, credentials, or data you are not authorised to provide;
bypass or attempt to bypass security controls, access controls, rate limits, or tenant boundaries;
attempt to reach another customer's workspace, policies, receipts, spend counters, or approvals;
introduce malware, or attempt unauthorised access to our systems;
deliberately try to evade sensitive-data detection;
resell, sublicense, or provide Anvil as a competing service;
reverse engineer the hosted service except where law expressly permits it;
send marketing email or text through an Anvil-guarded path without the consent and opt-out the law requires;
process raw payment-card authentication data or protected health information through Anvil. We do not offer a business associate agreement, and Anvil is not a PCI- or HIPAA-supported environment, so there is no configuration in which this is permitted; or
tell third parties that Anvil guarantees compliance, exactly-once execution, or complete prevention of anything.

Without our express written approval, you also may not use Anvil to run autonomous transfers, payouts, refunds, account deletions, or credential revocations without meaningful limits and monitoring; as the only control preventing material financial or irreversible loss; to make fully automated consequential decisions about individuals; or as the sole source of truth for sanctions screening or a legal-compliance determination.

6. Your data

You own your data. We process it to run, secure, support, and improve the service, and the privacy statement describes exactly what we collect and keep.

We do not use your content, logs, policies, or decision records to train models — ours or anyone else's — and we do not build cross-customer datasets from them. "Improve" here means operating, debugging, and hardening the service you are using. It does not mean training on your data. The only thing we take a broader right in is feedback you deliberately send us, covered in section 8.

Where we process personal data on your behalf, the DPA is incorporated into these terms by reference and governs where the two conflict on data protection. It also tells you plainly where we stand on producing a signed copy.

You are confirming, when you upload logs or connect a system, that you are authorised to give us that material and to let our disclosed sub-processors process it for that analysis or integration.

7. Beta status, changes, and availability

Anvil is beta software. We ship frequently, we may change or remove features, and we may impose or adjust rate limits. There is no service-level agreement during beta — we publish a status page and we would rather tell you honestly that something is down than promise a number we have not earned.

We may suspend access without notice if we reasonably believe there is a security risk, a legal requirement, or abuse that threatens the service or another customer. Suspension is meant to be short: we will tell you why, and restore access when the cause is resolved.

Either of us can end this at any time. You stop by stopping — close your workspace or tell us. We will give you at least 30 days' notice before we withdraw the service from you, except in the suspension cases above, where it can be immediate.

Getting your records out. Your decision records are exportable by you at any time, without asking, through the anvil audit command and the decision log in the dashboard — so the export does not depend on us being responsive. After access ends we will keep your data available for at least 30 days so you can pull it, and we will help if the export gives you trouble. We are not promising a particular file format or a migration into someone else's product, because we have not built either.

8. Intellectual property

We keep all rights in Anvil, its software, documentation, and brand. You keep all rights in your code, your data, and your policies. Feedback you send us we may use to improve the product, without obligation to you and without taking any rights in your systems.

The SDK is published under the licence stated in the package. Nothing here narrows a right that licence grants you.

9. No warranty

The service, the documentation, the outputs, the reports, and any preview feature are provided "as is" and "as available." To the maximum extent the law allows, we disclaim all implied and statutory warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, non-infringement, accuracy, and completeness.

We specifically do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, secure, or error-free; that every duplicate, policy violation, sensitive data element, or unauthorised action will be detected or prevented; that legitimate actions will not be blocked; or that outputs and records will be complete, accurate, or sufficient for your legal, security, or business purposes.

10. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent the law allows, neither of us is liable for indirect, incidental, special, exemplary, punitive, or consequential damages; for lost profits, revenue, goodwill, business, opportunity, or anticipated savings; for business interruption; for loss or corruption of data; for the cost of substitute services; or for damages arising from duplicate, blocked, delayed, failed, misdirected, or unknown actions — even if we were told they were possible.

The cap. Our total liability to you for all claims arising out of or relating to the service is limited to the amount you have paid us for it in the twelve months before the claim arose. During the free beta that amount is nothing, and we would rather say that in one sentence than let you infer it. If you later move onto a paid plan, the cap becomes the fees you actually paid, and a signed agreement may set a different one — where it does, it governs.

Nothing here excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited, including liability for fraud, fraudulent misrepresentation, death or personal injury caused by negligence, or anything else a court will not let us disclaim. If a consumer protection law applies to you and gives you more than this section does, it wins.

These disclaimers and limits are a deliberate allocation of risk between us, and they apply whatever the legal theory and even if a limited remedy fails of its essential purpose.

11. Indemnity

You will defend us against third-party claims arising from your data, your use of the service in breach of these terms, or an allegation that you lacked the rights, notices, consents, or authority for material you gave us — and cover the resulting damages and reasonable costs. We will tell you promptly about any such claim and let you control the defence of it.

12. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, excluding its conflict-of-laws rules and the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods. The courts located in San Francisco County, California have exclusive jurisdiction, and each of us consents to their jurisdiction and venue. Where a signed Master Services Agreement sets a different law or forum, that agreement governs.

Nothing here strips you of a right you have under the mandatory law of your own country of residence, and nothing here requires arbitration or waives a jury trial or a class action — we have not asked for any of that, and if that ever changes we will say so in a material-change notice rather than in a quiet edit.

Before filing anything, email henry@anvilcontrol.ai. Most of what reaches a lawyer here would have been fixed the same day by the person who wrote the code.

13. Everything else

Export control and sanctions. You may not use Anvil, or let anyone else use it, in violation of US export control or sanctions law, and you confirm you are not located in an embargoed territory and are not a restricted or denied party.

Force majeure. Neither of us is liable for a delay or failure caused by something outside our reasonable control — an infrastructure or provider outage, a network failure, a natural event, or government action. This does not excuse a payment obligation, and it is not a licence to stay down quietly: we will tell you what is happening on the status page.

Survival. Sections 5 (what you may not do), 6 (your data), 8 (intellectual property), 9 (no warranty), 10 (limitation of liability), 11 (indemnity), 12 (governing law and disputes), and this section survive termination for as long as they need to.

Entire agreement. These terms, the privacy statement, and the DPA are the whole agreement about the hosted service, and they replace anything said before them, including anything in a demo, a sales email, or a call. A signed Master Services Agreement supersedes them where it covers the same ground.

Publicity. We will not use your name or your logo as a customer reference without your written permission. If you would like us to, say so and we will show you exactly what we plan to say first.

The rest. If a provision is unenforceable, the rest stands and the unenforceable part is narrowed to what the law allows. Our not enforcing something is not a waiver of it. You may not assign these terms without our consent; we may assign them to a successor to our business, including the entity we incorporate. Notices to us go to henry@anvilcontrol.ai; notices to you go to the email on your workspace. Nothing here makes either of us the other's agent, partner, or employer.

Changes. We may update these terms. When we do we bump the version and the effective date at the top and note what changed at the foot of the page, and for a material change we tell customers directly rather than relying on you re-reading this page. If you keep using Anvil after a change takes effect, you are accepting it — and if you do not want to, tell us and we will help you export and leave.