Updating usage policy page 11/21/2024

fern/pages/responsible-use/responsible-use/usage-guidelines.mdx

@@ -1,68 +1,46 @@
 ---
 title: "Usage Guidelines"
-slug: "docs/usage-guidelines"
+slug: "docs/usage-policy"
 
 hidden: true
 description: "Developers must outline and get approval for their use case to access the Cohere API, understanding the models and limitations. They should refer to model cards for detailed information and document potential harms of their application. Certain use cases, such as violence, hate speech, fraud, and privacy violations, are strictly prohibited."
 image: "../../../assets/images/da0a0ac-cohere_docs_preview_image_1200x630_copy.jpg"  
 keywords: "Cohere API"
 
 createdAt: "Thu Sep 01 2022 19:24:15 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)"
-updatedAt: "Tue Apr 02 2024 10:30:48 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)"
+updatedAt: "Thu nov 21 2024 09::48 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)"
 ---
-To use our API, every developer must clearly outline their use case and have it approved by Cohere through our application process. The application requires thoroughly understanding our models and their limitations, which will change as the models improve. Beyond these Usage Guidelines, you should refer to the <a href="https://docs.cohere.ai/docs/generation-card" target="_blank">Generation</a> and <a href="https://docs.cohere.ai/docs/representation-card" target="_blank">Representation</a> model cards for detailed information about each model.
+(This document was updated on 11/21/2024)
 
-By understanding the language models that power our API endpoints, being aware of their limitations, and documenting your development practices, you can do great things with the Cohere Platform.
+Our Usage Policy applies to all Cohere products and services, including Cohere AI models, software, applications, and application programming interface (collectively *“Cohere Services”*). 
 
-### 1\. Comprehend Cohere
+The Usage Policy sets out universal requirements that apply to all users of the Cohere Services, and specific additional requirements that apply to users who create customer applications that integrate Cohere Services (each, a *“Customer Application”*). 
 
-(<a href ="https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.08271.pdf" target="_blank">Qiu et al., 2020</a>) describes the history, technical aspects, and applications of pre-trained language models like the ones which power the Cohere Platform. We recommend reading this survey and other language modeling research to learn what kinds of knowledge are encoded in language models and how to use their outputs responsibly in downstream tasks.
+We may update this Usage Policy from time to time by posting an updated version on our website.  
 
-Language models might encode the following:
+If we learn that you have violated this Usage Policy or are otherwise misusing or abusing Cohere Services, we are entitled to restrict, suspend, or terminate your access to the Cohere Services. If you become aware of a violation of this Usage Policy, including by any Outputs, you are required to notify us at [email protected]. If you are using the Cohere Services in our SaaS Platform, you can also report issues by using the thumbs down button on an Output.  “Outputs” means any information, text, image, audio or video content artificially created by Cohere Services.
 
-- **Linguistic information** such as subject-verb agreement, part-of-speech, and other simple syntactic structures (<a href ="https://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.08855" target="_blank">Liu et al., 2019</a>;<a href ="https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.03368" target="_blank">Hewitt et al., 2019</a>).
-- **World knowledge,** including relational and commonsense knowledge such as where famous individuals were born or the color of the sky, limited by what is contained in the training data.
-- **Social biases,** such as stereotypes common on the internet or in Western culture (<a href ="https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/N19-1063.pdf" target="_blank">May et al., 2019</a>).
+## Universal Requirements
 
-### 2\. Document your Application
+You must not use the Cohere Services to engage in, facilitate or promote any of the following prohibited activities. Descriptions of prohibited activities are illustrative, not exhaustive.  
 
-We encourage careful consideration and documentation of the potential harms of any application developed using the Cohere Platform. If you build an application that uses model outputs, please provide your users a link to the corresponding model card, explaining how your application uses its output. For example, if you trained a downstream classifier using the `embed` endpoint, users should be provided with thorough documentation (such as model cards and data statements) of that classifier's training procedure and behavior.
+- *Child Sexual Exploitation and Sexually Explicit Content Involving Minors*. Any activity that, whether intentionally or not, exploits, abuses, or endangers children, or otherwise compromises the safety of children; or any generation, creation, sharing, or facilitation of sexually explicit content involving minors, including pornographic content or content intended for sexual arousal or gratification. We will report child sexual abuse material that comes to our attention to competent authorities and other organizations as appropriate.
+- *Incitement of Violence or Harm.* Any use of the Cohere Services that (1) incites violence, threats, extremism, or terrorism; (2) glorifies or facilitates self-harm; (3) is sexually exploitative or abusive; (4) constitutes hate speech; or (5) promotes or glorifies racism, discrimination, hatred, or abuse, against any group or individual based on protected characteristics like race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, disability, sexual orientation, gender, or gender identity.
+- *Illegal Activities.* Any illegal activity, or other violation of any applicable law, including providing instructions on how to commit crimes, facilitating illegal activities or intentionally generating Outputs that may infringe, violate, or misappropriate, the intellectual property rights, including copyrights, of a third party.
+- *Weapons and Controlled Substances.* Any activities that relate to the production, sale, trafficking, or marketing of (1) weapons (or their components), including chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear weapons; or (2) controlled substances.
+- *Compromising Privacy or Identity.* Violation of a person’s privacy rights or applicable privacy regulations, including unlawful access to or tracking of a person’s physical location; unlawful social scoring; real-time identification of a person or inference of emotions or protected characteristics of a person such as race or political opinions based on biometric data (including facial recognition);  or other unauthorized access to personal information.
+- *Compromising Security.* Use of the Cohere Services to (1) compromise security or attempt to gain unauthorized access to computer systems or networks; (2) generate or propagate spam or carry out phishing or social engineering campaigns; (3) create or process any viruses or other computer programming routines that may damage, detrimentally interfere with, surreptitiously intercept, or expropriate any system or data; or (4) otherwise violate the integrity, availability, or confidentiality of a user, network, computing device, communications system, or software application. 
+- *Surveillance and Predictive Policing.* Any activities involving illegal profiling or surveillance, including spyware or communications surveillance, untargeted scraping of facial images to create or expand a facial recognition database, or predictive policing, i.e., assessing or predicting the risks of a person committing a criminal offence.
+- *Fraudulent, Abusive, Misleading, or Deceptive Practices.* Use of the Cohere Services to (1) generate inauthentic content representing existing persons, places, entities, events, or objects that could falsely appear as authentic or truthful (so-called “deep fakes”) or as having been created by a human (e.g., fake reviews) in a manner that is misleading, deceiving or harmful to individuals, groups, or entities; (2) engage in academic dishonesty; or (3) deploy subliminal or purposefully deceptive or manipulative techniques in products, campaigns, services or business models to exploit vulnerabilities such as age, socio-economic status, or disability; or to distort behaviour or impair decision-making, including exploitative lending or debt collection practices, misleading advertising, or high-pressure sales tactics.
+- *Misinformation and Political Campaigning/Lobbying.* Creation or promotion of harmful misinformation and disinformation, including defamatory or libelous content and political propaganda; attempting to manipulate public opinion on issues such as health, safety, government policies, laws, or political campaigns or politicians; or deterring people from participating in or otherwise attempting to disrupt democratic processes, including misrepresenting voting processes or qualifications and discouraging voting. 
+- *Abusing Cohere Services.* Any activities that aim to (1) circumvent, disable or otherwise interfere with security, safety or technical features or protocols; (2) exploit a vulnerability; or (3) otherwise intentionally bypass restrictions of the Cohere Services, including through jailbreaking, prompt injection attacks, or automation to circumvent bans or usage limitations.
+- *High Risk Activities.* Activities (1) where the use or failure of the Cohere Services could reasonably be expected to result in death, harm to psychological or physical health or safety, or severe environmental or property damage; or (2) that use the Cohere Services for automated determinations about individuals in domains that affect their rights, safety, or access to essential services and benefits (e.g., employment, education, healthcare, migration, housing, law enforcement, legal advice/decisions, or financial or insurance products or services). For the avoidance of doubt, backoffice uses (e.g., document summarization, transcription, internal knowledge agents, etc.) are not considered High Risk Activities under this Usage Policy.
 
-### 3\. Understand and Prevent Disallowed Use Cases
+## Customer Application Requirements
 
-The Cohere Platform may not be used for any of the following purposes. The description for each disallowed use case is illustrative but **not exhaustive**; Cohere reserves the right to terminate access for harms which are not listed at our sole discretion.
+You must ensure your Customer Application complies with the Universal Requirements of this Usage Policy and that users of your Customer Application understand and are required to comply with substantially similar requirements.
 
-- **Violence and threats:**
-  - **Violence/Incitement**: Actions that threaten, encourage, or incite violence against anyone, directly or indirectly.
-  - **Self-harm**: Promoting or glorifying acts of self-harm, such as cutting, eating disorders like anorexia or bulimia, and suicide.
-  - **Sexual exploitation**: Promoting or celebrating sexual exploitation, including the sexualization of minors.
-  - **Hate speech**: Promoting hatred or glorifying abuse against people based on characteristics like race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, disability, disease, age, sexual orientation, gender, or gender identity.
-- **Antisocial and antidemocratic uses:**
-  - **Harassment:** Bullying, threatening, shaming, or doxxing.
-  - **Insensitivity**: Belittling victims of serious physical or emotional harm (even if unintentional).
-  - **Intentional sowing of division**: Sharing of divisive generated content in order to turn a community against itself.
-  - **Harmful belief perpetuation**: Perpetuating racism, or sexism (even if unintentional).
-  - **Applications that aim to characterize identity:** Attempting to characterize gender, race, or ethnicity.
-  - **Graphic depictions**: Distribution of sexually explicit acts, torture, or abuse.
-  - **Political manipulation**: Attempting to influence political decisions, or opinions.
-- **Deceit:**
-  - **Fraud**: Catfishing, phishing, or attempting to circumvent the law.
-  - **Spam**: Sending unsolicited email and messages, or manipulating search engines.
-  - **Misrepresentation**: Representing raw generations as coming from humans, using supervised generations with false identities, or a single person using generations with many identities that appear to be independent.
-  - **Misinformation**: Creating or promoting harmful false claims about government policies, or public figures, including applications founded on unscientific premises.
-- **Attacks on security or privacy:**
-  - **Security breaches**: Spearphishing.
-  - **Privacy violations**: Model attacks to extract personal information.
-- **Unsafe unsupervised uses:**
-  - **Social media**: Posting content to social platforms in an automated way.
-  - **No transparency**: Applications that do not disclose that the content is generated through automated means.
-- **Decision-making**:
-  - AI-based social scoring for general purposes done by public authorities; using output toward larger decision-making systems that will influence actions, decisions, or policies without a human in the loop.
-  - **Classification of individuals**: Applications that classify and/or profile people based on protected characteristics, or infer those characteristics from text written about them or by them.
-- **Other**:
-  - **Intentional manipulative redirection of attention**: Sharing positive generated content in order to direct attention away from harmful actions.
-  - **Plagiarism**: Tools that promote academic dishonesty.
+If your Customer Application is public-facing and interacts with human users (including consumers), like chatbots and interactive AI agents, you must: (1) disclose to the users that they are interacting with an AI system rather than a human; and (2) if the Customer Application interacts with minors, comply with any specific child safety regulations and implement appropriate additional safety controls such as age verification and content moderation.
 
-Usages which appear to violate our guidelines should be reported within 24 hours to Cohere by contacting us at [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]).
-
-**Note about adversarial attacks:** Intentional stress testing of the API and adversarial attacks are allowable, but violative generations must be disclosed here, [reported immediately](https://ai8x92z50km.typeform.com/to/EI7d26j6#user_id=xxxxx&organization_id=xxxxx), and must not be used for any purpose except for documenting the result of such attacks in a responsible manner.
+## Research Exceptions 
+Cohere encourages responsible security and safety research. Limited exceptions to our Usage Policy are possible for research purposes if specifically authorized by us or permitted in accordance with our Responsible Disclosure Policy applicable to security research. For safety-related research that falls outside the scope of our Responsible Disclosure Policy or to report a model safety issue, please contact [email protected].