news.ycombinator.com• Feb 24, 2026• 1 min read
Terms of use: What types of competition do model providers ban?I thought it would be interesting to look at the terms of service of the frontier labs and there was more deviation than I expected when it comes to the issue of building competing offerings. Note that I am not a lawyer and none of this is legal advice. You should refer to the specific versions of the agreements that apply to you and consult with a lawyer.It is very common for technology companies (particularly when providing data through an API,) to include a term that more-or-less says their customers can't build a product that will compete with them. These terms can become quite contentious and may be the subject of detailed negotiations on a customer by customer basis. An example is in the finance industry where a number of companies provide products to end users but also licsense data to other companies that also make products for end users.Looking at the four big labs, I prefer the terms from OpenAI and Google (Gemini). Unless I am missing something, they are both relatively narr