Methodology

How the observatory archives, detects, and classifies published terms.

How this works

The Compute Terms Observatory is an automated research tracker of the published terms of cloud infrastructure providers and AI model families. It works in three stages.

1. Archive. Twice daily, an automated workflow fetches each tracked provider's public terms of service, SLAs, acceptable-use and usage policies, model licenses, and deprecation policies, and archives a normalized text snapshot with a timestamp and content hash. Fetching uses three tiers in order — a direct request as an identified archival agent, a headless browser for JavaScript-rendered pages, and the Internet Archive as a fallback (dated by capture time) — and never attempts to bypass a CAPTCHA or other interactive challenge. A small number of sources block direct automated retrieval; for those, the archived version is the most recent Internet Archive capture, dated individually on each value, and may lag the live page. The “terms last checked” time on the main page reflects the most recent run of the directly fetched sources.
2. Detect. When a document's normalized text changes between runs, the system records the localized before/after difference. The change feed is generated from those differences; quoted excerpts are kept short.
3. Classify. When a document changes, an AI model (Claude, by Anthropic) reads it against a fixed, published schema of contract dimensions and records, for each, a value and a short verbatim supporting quote copied from the document. The code mechanically checks that the quote actually appears in the archived text. Values whose quote cannot be verified are published as “unverified” with low confidence and should be given no weight.

Why the tables differ by segment

Each segment’s table shows only the dimensions that can meaningfully exist for that entry type. A dimension is omitted only when it is structurally inapplicable — the precondition does not exist — not merely because today’s providers are silent. Collective silence is a finding and stays (for example, closed-API providers that publish no SLA still show an availability row, because a service could commit to uptime). The omissions per segment:

Cloud Infrastructure Providers

• Model license — infrastructure providers distribute no model weights, so the license under which weights are distributed has no referent.
• Model documentation commitments — infrastructure providers publish no model/system cards; the commitment has no referent for a compute service.
• Training data provenance statements — infrastructure providers train no models on their own account, so training-data provenance has no referent.

Closed API AI Model Providers

• Hardware substitution rights — a closed API allocates tokens/throughput, not GPUs; there is no hardware to substitute.
• Model license — closed-API providers distribute no model weights, so the license under which weights are distributed has no referent (references to IP ownership or usage restrictions belong to other dimensions).

Open Weight AI Model Providers

• Availability definition — an availability definition describes a service's uptime commitment; an open-weight license distributes weights with no service attached, so the precondition does not exist.
• Credit regime — SLA service credits presuppose a service level to breach; a downloadable license has no service.
• Claim mechanics — there is no SLA to claim credits against.
• SLA exclusions — there is no SLA whose scope could be excluded.
• Capacity & reservation terms — no hosted capacity is provisioned to reserve.
• Capacity delivery remedies — there is no capacity delivery obligation to remedy.
• Hardware substitution rights — no hardware is allocated, so none can be substituted.

Reading the status labels

Every value in the matrix carries one of four labels describing how well it is supported. Nothing here is human-verified; the labels describe the automated check, not anyone's review.

• Quote verified. The value is backed by a short verbatim quote that the code mechanically found in the archived source text.
• Unverified. The model returned a value but no supporting quote could be matched to the source. Give it no weight without reading the document yourself.
• Silent. The provider's terms do not address this dimension — there is no governing clause to quote. This is a finding about the terms, not a failure of the tool.
• Not applicable. The dimension does not apply to this offering — for example, service-level or capacity terms for a downloadable open-weight model, which is a license rather than a hosted service.

Provenance

Every value records the document it came from, its source URL, the fetch date, the archived version's content hash, and the model used, so any datapoint traces back to the exact text that produced it. License values attach to the specific license document and model generation they came from; they are never asserted across a whole model family.

What this is not

This site reports what public documents say, with citations. It does not characterize, rate, or recommend, and it gives no advice. It is AI-generated analysis of public documents; no attorney reviews individual classifications before publication, and classifications may be wrong, incomplete, or out of date. Public terms are only a starting point — negotiated agreements routinely differ from a provider's public documents. Nothing here is legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is created by reading it. Read the underlying documents, which are linked from every datapoint, and consult your own counsel.

Corrections

Every datapoint links to its source. Everything here is AI-reviewed — there is no human-verified tier. A correction can adjust a value or its citation, but the corrected quote is then re-checked against the archived source exactly like any other value, and carries no special badge. If you spot an error, open an issue in the source repository.

Coverage & data

The code is open source (MIT). The change history is published here as the change feed; the archived snapshot corpus is maintained in the project's data repository. See the About page for the full provider and dimension coverage.