Contributor Terms of Service

01Acceptance, eligibility and sanctions

These terms are a binding contract between you and Cortext Labs, Inc., a corporation incorporated in Delaware, United States with its registered address at 1 Sansome Street, Suite 3500, San Francisco, CA 94104, United States (“Cortext”, “we”, “us”). You accept them by creating an account, by submitting an application, or by accepting an engagement — whichever happens first. If you do not accept them, do not create an account.

This is version 4.2, published 18 June 2026 and effective 20 July 2026. It replaces version 4.1, effective 15 january 2026.

Who is eligible

• You are at least 18 years old. This is verified against a government document during onboarding, not taken on trust, and it applies everywhere we operate regardless of the local age of majority.
• You have the legal capacity to enter into a contract in your country of residence and are entering into it on your own behalf, not for an employer or an agency.
• You are legally permitted to perform independent contractor work in your country of residence and to receive payment for it, including any business registration, permit or visa condition that applies to you. We do not sponsor visas and we do not assess your immigration status for you.
• You have not previously been offboarded by Cortext for cause under section 15, unless we have agreed in writing to reinstate you.

Sanctions, export control and restricted territories

You represent that you are not named on, and are not majority-owned or controlled by a person named on, the US Treasury Specially Designated Nationals list, the UK HM Treasury consolidated list, the EU consolidated list or the UN sanctions lists; and that you are not ordinarily resident in a territory subject to comprehensive sanctions. We screen every account at onboarding and re-screen periodically. You must tell us within 5 business days if any of this stops being true.

You also agree not to use the platform to export, re-export or transfer controlled technical data in breach of US export control law or the equivalent regime where you live, and not to perform work for or on behalf of a restricted end user. Some engagements carry additional nationality or residency restrictions imposed by the client for export-control reasons; where they do, the restriction is stated on the listing before you apply.

A screening match suspends the account while we check it. False positives on common names are the usual cause, and we clear them within 5 business days of receiving the documentation we ask for. Hours already worked and accepted before a suspension are paid in the normal run unless payment is itself prohibited by the sanction. Where the law forbids us from engaging you, we cannot waive it, whatever the circumstances.

02Your account, and the one-account rule

You must register under your full legal name, matching the government document used for identity verification, and give a working email address that you control. The address on the account is where every legal notice under these terms is sent, so keep it current: notice sent to a stale address is still valid notice.

One person, one account, no delegation

• You may hold one account only. Holding or operating a second account, under any name, is a material breach.
• You must perform the work yourself. You may not share credentials, let another person work under your account, subcontract an engagement, or operate an account on behalf of an agency, a team or a group of contributors.
• Accounts are personal and non-transferable. You may not sell, rent, lend or bequeath an account, and any purported transfer is void.
• You are responsible for all activity under your account, including work submitted by anyone you let in.

Security

Use a unique password and enable every authentication factor we offer. Tell security@cortext-ai.uk within 24 hours of noticing a suspected compromise; we will lock the account, preserve the audit log and work through what happened with you. We will never ask for your password, and — because Cortext operates no telephone channel at all — anyone who calls you claiming to be from Cortext is not.

What happens if we find a duplicate account

Duplicate accounts distort quality metrics and let one person take work sized for several, so detection ends the relationship: all accounts we can attribute to you are closed under section 15. Hours worked in good faith on your original account and accepted before detection are paid in the normal payout run. Hours attributable to the duplicate account are not payable, because the engagement they were performed under was obtained by breaching this section. You may appeal within 14 days and the appeal goes to a reviewer who was not part of the original decision.

03What Cortext is, and who contracts with whom

Cortext operates a marketplace that matches domain experts with projects commissioned by AI labs and research groups. We publish opportunities, screen applicants, define the specification and rubric for each project with the client, route work, review and score what is submitted, deliver it, and pay contributors.

The contracting chain

• Cortext Labs, Inc. contracts with the client under a separate master services agreement to which you are not a party and which you have no right to see.
• Cortext Labs, Inc. contracts with you under these terms and the engagement letter for each engagement. Your counterparty is Cortext and nobody else.
• You have no contract with the client. The client owes you nothing, is not responsible for paying you, and cannot direct your work except through the specification and rubric that Cortext passes to you. If a client fails to pay Cortext, we still owe you for accepted hours; your pay does not depend on our collection.

What we are not

Cortext is not an employer, an employer of record, a staffing agency, an employment agency, a professional employer organisation, a recruitment consultancy or a career placement service. We do not act as your agent, we do not negotiate on your behalf, and we do not represent you to third parties. We are the counterparty to a services contract and the operator of the platform through which it is performed.

We do not guarantee that any particular opportunity is suitable for you, that a client will accept a deliverable, or that a project will run to its advertised length. Those limits are set out in section 14.

04Independent contractor status

You perform work for Cortext as an independent contractor. Nothing in these terms, in an engagement letter, or in the way work is routed creates an employment relationship, a partnership, a joint venture, an agency, a franchise or a fiduciary relationship between you and Cortext, or between you and a client. This section is the operative one, and everything in it is a commitment we hold ourselves to as much as a statement about you.

No benefits

You are not entitled to and will not receive any benefit that Cortextprovides to its employees. That means: no health, dental or vision insurance; no paid holiday, sick leave or parental leave; no pension, 401(k) or employer retirement contribution; no unemployment insurance; no workers’ compensation cover; no disability cover; no severance; no equity, option grant or profit share; no expense account; and no participation in any employee bonus plan. Payment for accepted work under section 7 is the whole of what you receive.

No withholding

Cortext does not withhold or remit income tax, social security, Medicare, national insurance, pension contributions or any equivalent from your pay, and does not pay any employer-side contribution on your behalf. You are paid gross. Section 9 sets out what you are responsible for. The single exception is US backup withholding, which the Internal Revenue Code requires us to apply in the circumstances described there.

Your own equipment and workspace

You supply your own computer, operating system, internet connection, electricity, workspace, chair, monitor and any professional subscription your work depends on. Cortext does not issue hardware, does not reimburse connectivity, equipment, coworking or utility costs, and does not provide a stipend for them, unless a specific engagement letter says so in writing. Any tool we do require you to use will be browser-based, provided at no cost, and named on the listing before you apply.

Your own schedule

You decide whether to accept an engagement, when to work on it, in what order, from where, and for how many hours within the window the engagement letter sets. Cortext specifies the deliverable, the rubric, the quality standard and the deadline. We do not set your working hours, require you to be online at particular times, track idle time, require attendance at recurring meetings, or discipline you for working at three in the morning. Declining an offered engagement carries no penalty and does not affect your standing or your matching.

There is one honest exception. A small number of engagements require live participation — a red-team session run against a model in real time, or a calibration call with a client research team. Those carry a stated coverage window on the listing, before you apply, and accepting one is your choice.

Your right to work elsewhere

You may work for anyone else at any time, including our direct competitors, including during a Cortext engagement, and including for the same AI labs through their own hiring channels. We do not ask for exclusivity. We do not ask you to sign a non-compete. We do not require you to disclose your other clients, and we will not reduce your matching or your rate because you have them.

The only restriction on where else you work is the non-circumvention rule in section 12, which stops you taking a specific engagement we introduced you to off-platform. It is deliberately narrow: it does not prevent you applying to that client directly through its own public channels, does not prevent you doing unrelated work for it, and does not survive as a general bar on competing with us.

Control, and the consequences of this classification

• You are free to determine the method by which you achieve the specified result, subject only to the rubric, the confidentiality obligations in section 11 and the content standards in section 13.
• You may not hold yourself out as an employee, officer, agent or representative of Cortext, sign anything on our behalf, or incur any liability in our name.
• You are responsible for your own insurance, including professional indemnity cover if your profession requires it, and for any licence or registration you must maintain to practise.
• You bear the risk of profit and loss on your own work: rejected items are not paid, and time you spend improving your own efficiency is yours to gain from.
• If a court, tribunal or agency reclassifies the relationship in any jurisdiction, Cortext may amend the applicable rates prospectively to reflect the employer-side costs that reclassification imposes, on 30 days’ notice under section 21. It does not create any retrospective entitlement between us beyond what the law itself requires.

05Applications, assessments and paid work trials

Applying is free and there is never a fee to be placed on a project, to work through Cortext, or to be paid. Anyone asking you to pay for placement, training, equipment or a “verification deposit” in our name is committing fraud; report it to trust@cortext-ai.uk.

Optional priority review

You may pay a one-time fee to have an application moved to the front of the review queue. It buys review order and nothing else: it does not influence the outcome, and it is not a placement, application or processing fee. The free queue reaches every application regardless.

The priority review fee is non-refundableonce the review has been performed, including where the outcome is a rejection — the fee pays for a reviewer's time, which is spent either way. If we fail to review a priority application within the window stated at the time of payment, write to support@cortext-ai.uk and we will refund it.

The stages

• Credential verification. We check the licences, registrations, degrees and employment you claim, against issuing bodies where they can be checked. About 61% of applicants clear this stage.
• Domain assessment. 60–90 minutes, scored against a reference set with a pass mark of 80%. Because it runs past our 30-minute ceiling on unpaid screening, it is paid at the listing rate whether or not you pass. About 34% of those who reach it pass.
• Interview. 25 minutes with a domain reviewer, by video. Recording is optional and the interview goes ahead either way. Up to 3 reschedules are allowed before an application lapses.
• Paid work trial. 3–5 hours of real project work, paid at the listing rate whether or not it leads to an engagement. About 71% of trials succeed.

Overall, about 6.8% of applicants are admitted, and the median time from application to a first paid task is 17 days. A failed assessment starts a 30-day wait before you can retake it for the same role family. Screening results are personal to you and are not transferred between accounts.

Rules that apply from the first submission

• All work must be your own. Using a generative model to produce a submission on a task designated as human-judgment is a breach of section 12 at every stage, including the assessment.
• Assessment content, gold answers and rubrics are confidential under section 11. Publishing them, or sharing them in a study group, ends the application and usually the account.
• Credentials must be genuine and current. Fabricating one is fraud, ends the account permanently, and where a professional licence is involved may be reported to the issuing body.
• Passing screening is not an offer of work. It makes you eligible to be matched; it does not oblige us to match you.

06Project engagements

An engagement is formed when you accept an offer in the product and the engagement letter is countersigned electronically. The engagement letter states the scope, the rate and unit, the deliverable specification, the rubric, the estimated volume, the window and any client-specific requirements such as a background check or a confidentiality addendum. Where the engagement letter and these terms conflict, the engagement letter controls for that engagement only, and only to the extent of the conflict.

Scope and change

We may change the specification or rubric during an engagement — clients refine what they need, and a rubric that survives contact with real items is rare. Material changes are notified in writing before they apply, and items already submitted are scored against the rubric in force when you submitted them, not the new one. If a change makes the work materially different from what you accepted, you may end the engagement immediately under the paragraph below and all accepted work is paid.

Ending an engagement

• Youmay end an engagement on 5 days’ written notice, or immediately where the work has changed materially, where the content standards in section 13 apply, or where continuing would breach a professional obligation you owe elsewhere.
• Wemay end an engagement on 5 days’ written notice, or immediately for cause under section 15.
• The client may cancel or pause the underlying project. Where it does, the engagement ends on the same notice we receive, which is sometimes immediate. All work submitted and accepted before that point is paid in full, and work in progress on a per-item engagement is paid for completed items.
• An engagement that reaches its stated end date expires without notice. It does not renew automatically and there is no expectation of renewal.

Ending an engagement does not close your account, does not affect your standing, and does not stop you being matched to something else. The obligations in section 10 and section 11 continue.

07Rates, invoicing and the Friday payout run

Every listing shows its rate band before you apply, and the engagement letter states the rate that applies to you. Rates are per approved hour or per accepted item, are quoted and paid in US dollars, and are the same regardless of where you live. We do not run reverse auctions and we do not ask what you currently earn.

The payout cycle

Rails, currency and fees

Stripe covers 113 countries. Where it does not reach, we pay through Wise — currently Brazil, Georgia, Ghana, Kosovo, Nepal, Türkiye, United Arab Emirates among others. Cortextabsorbs the processor’s foreign-exchange spread rather than deducting it from your payout, and charges no platform fee, no commission and no withdrawal fee. The only charge we ever apply is the optional instant-payout fee above, and you have to choose it. Your own bank may charge you a receiving or conversion fee, which is outside our control.

Self-billing

You do not raise invoices. Cortext generates a self-billed invoice on your behalf from approved hours or accepted items and makes it available in the product before the payout run. By accepting these terms you consent to self-billing and agree not to raise a separate VAT or GST invoice for the same work. Check the statement: your route to object to what is on it is section 8.

Failed and misdirected payments

A payout rejected by the receiving bank is retried and typically resolves in 8–12 business days. A payout sent to details you entered incorrectly takes 10–15 business days to recover, and a payment trace runs 5–10 business days. We do not charge you for a recovery, but we cannot guarantee recovery of funds delivered to a valid account that is not yours. Payment questions go to payments@cortext-ai.uk.

08Hour review, adjustment and the dispute window

Submitted work is reviewed within 3 days. A reviewer may accept it, return it for revision, or adjust the hours claimed where the time recorded does not match the work delivered or where items fail the rubric.

How an adjustment must be made

• A named reviewer makes the decision. No hour is removed by an automated signal alone.
• The reviewer records a written reason citing the specific rubric clause, and that reason is shown to you in full. “Quality” on its own is not a reason and will not survive an appeal.
• You are notified by email at the address on your account on the day the adjustment is made, before the payout run it affects.
• We will not adjust hours more than 30 days after the close of the pay week they fall in, except where fraud is alleged and under investigation.

Disputing it

You have 14 calendar days from the date of the adjustment notice to dispute it. Reply to the notice or email payments@cortext-ai.uk with the engagement reference and what you say is wrong. There is no form and no fee.

• The dispute is decided by a reviewer who had no part in the original decision, within 10 business days of receipt.
• If it succeeds, the hours are restored and paid in the next payout run, with no deduction and no delay beyond that run.
• If it fails, you receive a written explanation that addresses your specific points. You may escalate once, and the final internal decision on quality grounds rests with the Chief Quality Officer.
• The 14-day window is a condition of raising the dispute through this route. It does not shorten any limitation period the law gives you, and it does not replace section 19.

09Taxes and required forms

You are solely responsible for determining, reporting and paying every tax, levy and social contribution arising from what Cortext pays you, in every jurisdiction where you owe it. We are not your tax adviser and nothing on the platform is tax advice.

Forms you must provide

• Form W-9 if you are a US person, before your first payout. It is collected and stored by Stripe; Cortext sees only that it is on file and valid.
• Form W-8BEN (individuals) or Form W-8BEN-E (entities) if you are not a US person. These expire at the end of the third calendar year after signing and must be renewed; we prompt you before expiry, and payouts pause if the form lapses.
• Any local registration or tax identifier the payment rail requires in your country.

What we issue, and what we do not

US persons paid at or above the Internal Revenue Service reporting threshold in a calendar year receive Form 1099-NEC by 31 January of the following year, delivered electronically through Stripe. Non-US persons do not receive a 1099; we report on Form 1042-S only where withholding actually applies. We do not issue P60s, P45s, payslips, employment references framed as employment, or any document describing you as an employee, because section 4 says you are not one.

Backup withholding

If a US person’s taxpayer identification number is missing, or fails IRS TIN matching, or the IRS notifies us to do so, we are required to apply backup withholding at the statutory rate of 24% and remit it to the IRS. We will tell you before the first affected payout and it stops as soon as a valid form is on file. Amounts already withheld are recoverable from the IRS through your own return, not from us.

VAT, GST and indirect taxes

Rates are quoted exclusive of VAT, GST and equivalent indirect taxes. Where you are registered and such a tax applies to your supply of services to Cortext, it is handled through the self-billing arrangement in section 7, and you must tell us your registration number and any change to it. Where you are not registered, nothing is added. If a tax authority later determines that an amount was payable, you remain responsible for it, and we will co-operate with the documentation you need.

10Intellectual property and assignment of work product

This section is the one clients care most about, so it is written to be unambiguous rather than gentle. In short: what you create on an engagement belongs to Cortext and can be passed to the client; what you already owned stays yours.

Definitions

Work Product means everything you conceive, create, write, record, submit or deliver in connection with an assessment, a work trial or an engagement, in any medium, including ratings and rankings, written reference answers, rubrics and rubric scores, reasoning and critiques, prompts and adversarial attacks, annotations of model outputs and agent trajectories, transcripts, code, test cases, datasets, and every derivative, improvement and intermediate draft of any of them.

Background IP means intellectual property you owned or controlled before the engagement, or that you develop independently of it without using Work Product or Confidential Information.

Assignment

You hereby irrevocably assign to Cortext Labs, Inc., its successors and assigns, all right, title and interest worldwide in and to the Work Product, including all copyright, patent rights, database rights, trade secret rights, and all other intellectual property rights, together with the right to sue for and recover damages for past infringement. The assignment takes effect on creation of each item without further act. To the extent any Work Product qualifies as a “work made for hire” under 17 U.S.C. section 101, it is a work made for hire and Cortext Labs, Inc. is the author.

Where an assignment of future rights is not effective at creation under the law of your country, you assign each item on delivery, and in the meantime grant Cortext Labs, Inc. an exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, fully-paid, sublicensable and transferable licence to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, distribute and create derivative works from it for any purpose — including training, fine-tuning and evaluating AI models.

Cortext Labs, Inc. may assign or sublicense these rights onward to the client that commissioned the project, and does so as a matter of course. Clients are intended third-party beneficiaries of this section and of section 11, and may enforce them directly.

Moral rights

To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, you irrevocably waive, and agree never to assert, all moral rights and rights of a similar nature in the Work Product — including the right to be identified as author, the right to object to derogatory treatment, and any right of integrity, attribution, withdrawal or paternity — against Cortext Labs, Inc., its clients, and their respective successors, assigns and licensees. Where the law of your country does not permit that waiver, you irrevocably consent to every act or omission that would otherwise infringe those rights, and you covenant not to bring or support a claim based on them. This is why work product is normally delivered under a pseudonymous identifier rather than your name, and why a named-attribution engagement requires the separate consent described in the privacy policy.

Your pre-existing IP

• Background IP is not assigned and remains yours. Nothing here transfers your prior publications, your existing code, your teaching material, your research, or anything you build on your own time outside the engagement.
• If you incorporate Background IP into a deliverable, you grant Cortext Labs, Inc. a non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, sublicensable licence to use it as part of that Work Product and for no other purpose. You are not giving away the underlying asset.
• You must not include in a deliverable any Background IP you are not free to licence on those terms, any third-party material you do not have the right to sublicense, anything owned by an employer or another client, or anything subject to an open-source licence whose conditions would attach to the Work Product. If in doubt, say so before you submit; we would rather adjust the deliverable than receive something we cannot pass on.
• You warrant that the Work Product is your original work, does not infringe anyone else’s rights, and is not subject to any obligation that conflicts with this section. Section 18 applies if that turns out not to be true.

Further assurances and feedback

You will sign the documents and do the things Cortext Labs, Inc. reasonably requests, at our expense, to perfect, register or enforce the rights assigned here, including after the engagement ends. If we cannot reach you at the address on your account after two written requests and 15 business days, you appoint Cortext Labs, Inc. as your attorney solely to execute those documents on your behalf, and for no other purpose. Separately, any suggestion or feedback you give us about the platform itself may be used freely, without obligation or compensation.

This section survives termination of these terms, and is not conditional on anything other than our obligation to pay for accepted work under section 7, which is unaffected by it.

11Confidentiality and non-disclosure

Much of what you see on an engagement is not public and is commercially sensitive to the client — often more sensitive than the work itself. Some engagements add a separate confidentiality agreement; where they do, it supplements this section rather than replacing it, and the stricter obligation applies.

What is confidential

• Prompts, test items, evaluation sets, gold answers, rubrics, scoring criteria and calibration material.
• Model outputs, system prompts, model names and version identifiers, unreleased capabilities, and any failure mode, jailbreak or vulnerability you discover.
• The identity of a client, the existence of a client relationship, the nature of a project, and the fact that a particular model is being evaluated at all.
• Other contributors’ identities, submissions and scores; internal tooling, processes and non-public rates.
• Anything marked confidential, or that a reasonable person would understand to be.

What you must do

Keep it confidential, use it only to perform the engagement, and disclose it to nobody. Specifically: do not post screenshots, do not quote prompts or outputs on social media, Discord, Reddit, a blog, a newsletter, a CV, a portfolio, a conference talk or an academic paper; do not tell a recruiter which lab you worked for; do not paste confidential material into any third-party service, including any AI assistant, other than tools Cortext has named for the engagement; and do not retain copies after the engagement ends. On request you must return or destroy confidential material within 10 business days and confirm in writing that you have.

What is not covered

Information that is or becomes public without your breach; that you already lawfully knew without an obligation of confidence; that you develop independently without using confidential material; or that you lawfully receive from a third party free to disclose it. If you are compelled to disclose by law or by a court, you may — but tell us first where you are legally able to, so we can seek protection, and disclose only what is required.

Things this section does not stop you doing

• Reporting a suspected violation of law to a government agency or regulator, or participating in an agency investigation. You do not need our permission or notice, and we will not retaliate.
• Immunity under 18 U.S.C. section 1833(b): you cannot be held criminally or civilly liable under any federal or state trade secret law for disclosing a trade secret in confidence to a government official or an attorney solely for the purpose of reporting or investigating a suspected violation of law, or in a sealed court filing.
• Discussing your own pay, hours and working conditions with other contributors or publicly. Rate bands are published on our own listings; we are not going to pretend they are secret.
• Reporting a genuine AI safety concern to the client, to us at trust@cortext-ai.uk, or — where the risk is serious and unaddressed — to an appropriate authority.

Survival

These obligations continue for five years after the engagement ends, and indefinitely for anything that qualifies as a trade secret and for the identity of a client whose engagement was marked confidential. Breach is grounds for immediate offboarding under section 15, and because damages are usually inadequate, Cortext and the affected client may seek injunctive relief without posting a bond.

12Acceptable use and prohibited conduct

Everything below ends work, and most of it ends the account. The list is specific because a vague standard is one that gets applied unevenly.

Integrity of the account

• Creating or operating more than one account, or helping someone else do so, including through a family member, a colleague or a shared device.
• Letting anyone else perform work under your account, or performing work under someone else’s.
• Fabricating or overstating a credential, employment, publication, licence, registration or reference; supplying an altered document; or using another person’s identity documents.

Integrity of the work

• Using generative AI to produce submissions on a human-judgment task. The entire value of what you deliver is that a qualified human produced it. Some engagements do require you to use a model — to generate a candidate answer for you to critique, for example — and those say so explicitly in the specification. If the specification does not say you may, you may not, and detection is treated as fraud rather than as a quality issue.
• Plagiarism: copying from another contributor, from a published source without attribution where the rubric requires original work, or resubmitting your own prior submission as new work.
• Inflating hours, running automation to simulate activity, padding item counts, or claiming time not spent on the engagement.
• Deliberately submitting low-effort work that is designed to pass automated checks rather than to be correct.

Platform and non-circumvention

• Scraping the platform, bypassing rate limits, probing for vulnerabilities outside the disclosure programme, attempting to access another contributor’s data, or interfering with the service.
• Circumventing the platform. Where Cortextintroduces you to a client, or discloses a client’s identity to you in connection with an engagement, you may not solicit or accept work of the same kind from that client outside Cortext during the engagement and for 12 months after it ends. This is a non-circumvention rule and nothing more: it does not stop you applying to that client through its own public hiring channels, does not cover work of a different kind, does not cover a relationship you already had with that client before we introduced you, and it is not a non-compete — see section 4.
• Reselling, subcontracting or brokering access to Cortext engagements; charging another person for a referral beyond the referral programme; or operating a service that resells our listings.
• Misrepresenting your relationship with Cortext, using our name or marks without written permission, or holding yourself out as speaking for us.
• Harassing, threatening or abusing Cortext staff, reviewers, clients or other contributors, in any channel.

13Content standards and consent for safety projects

What you must not put into a submission

• Personal data about a third party. If your professional expertise draws on real cases, de-identify them properly before writing anything down: no names, no dates of birth, no record numbers, no addresses, no detail combination that could identify a person. A clinician who pastes a real patient case into a reference answer has breached this section and possibly their own professional duty.
• Material you are bound to keep confidential for someone else — an employer, another client, a research sponsor or a court.
• Unlawful content, content that infringes someone’s intellectual property, or content whose creation or possession is itself an offence.
• Malware, exploits or live credentials, other than within a security engagement whose specification expressly requires them and provides a sandbox for them.

Safety, red-team and harmful-content engagements

Some projects require you to write, elicit or evaluate distressing material: descriptions of violence and self-harm, extremist and radicalisation content, harassment, graphic medical imagery, fraud and manipulation techniques, and detailed policy text about abuse categories. This work exists because models have to be tested against it before they meet the public, and someone qualified has to do the testing.

• Every such engagement carries a content warning on the listing, naming the categories involved, before you apply.
• You give separate written consent at acceptance, distinct from accepting these terms. Consent to one safety engagement is not consent to another.
• You may stop at any point, without notice and without penalty. Work completed up to that point is paid in full, your standing is unaffected, and you will not be deprioritised for future matching. Nobody has to explain why.
• Exposure is capped at 4 hours per day on flagged engagements, and the platform enforces the cap rather than trusting the schedule.
• Cortext provides access to an external, confidential counselling line at no cost to you for the duration of a flagged engagement and for 60 days after it ends. Using it is invisible to us; we are billed for availability, not for individual sessions.
• Cortext does not accept projects that require the review, creation or classification of child sexual abuse material, and will not, at any rate, on any timeline. Suspected CSAM encountered in any context must be reported immediately to trust@cortext-ai.uk and not retained, forwarded or described further.

14Platform availability and no guarantee of work

We aim to keep the platform available and we monitor it continuously, but we do not offer contributors a service level agreement and we do not credit or compensate for downtime. Planned maintenance that requires downtime is announced at least 48 hours in advance by email and in the product, and is scheduled outside the Friday payout run wherever possible. Emergency maintenance happens without notice when security requires it.

Features marked beta or preview may change or be withdrawn without notice, and are provided without any commitment as to their continuation.

No guarantee of work volume

This is the limit contributors most often discover the hard way, so it is stated plainly.

• Passing screening does not entitle you to work. Being matched previously does not entitle you to be matched again.
• Cortext guarantees no minimum number of hours, no minimum earnings, no minimum number of offered engagements, and no continuity between them.
• Projects begin and end on the client’s timeline. A project can end mid-week because the client concluded its research, and an account in perfectly good standing can go weeks with nothing matching its profile — this is normal and is not a signal about your quality.
• Rates on a future engagement may be higher or lower than one you did before. A rate is fixed for the engagement it appears in and not beyond it.
• We do not promise that any particular volume of work will exist in your specialism, your language or your time zone.

15Suspension, offboarding and termination

You may leave at any time

Close your account whenever you like, from the product or by emailing support@cortext-ai.uk. Hours worked and accepted before closure are paid in the normal payout run — closing an account does not forfeit money owed. Open engagements end on 5 days’ notice unless we agree otherwise. Deletion of your personal data follows the retention schedule.

Termination without cause

Either party may terminate this agreement for convenience on 5 days’ written notice. Engagements in progress at the end of the notice period are completed and paid, or are ended and paid for the work accepted, at our option, and we will say which in the notice.

Suspension and offboarding for cause

We may suspend access immediately, and offboard permanently, where we reasonably determine that you have: operated more than one account; fabricated a credential; used generative AI on a human-judgment task; plagiarised; inflated hours or automated activity; breached section 11; circumvented the platform under section 12; harassed staff, reviewers or contributors; matched a sanctions list; or done anything that exposes Cortext or a client to legal liability.

How that decision is made and challenged

• A person decides it. Automated detection can trigger a review and can hold work pending review; it cannot suspend or offboard anyone.
• The notice states the ground relied on and summarises the evidence, to the extent that disclosure does not compromise an ongoing investigation or another person’s safety.
• You have 14 days to appeal by replying to the notice. The appeal is decided by someone who was not part of the original decision, within 10 business days.
• Hours worked and accepted before suspension are paid in the normal run. Where fraud is alleged, hours under investigation may be held for up to 30 days; if the investigation does not substantiate the allegation they are paid in the next run following, with no further deduction.
• Offboarding for cause is permanent, and creating a replacement account afterwards is a further breach of section 2.

What survives

Termination for any reason does not end section 10, section 11, section 9, section 16, section 17, section 18, section 19, section 20 or section 23, nor any payment obligation that had already accrued.

16Disclaimer of warranties

The platform and everything on it are provided “as is” and “as available”. To the fullest extent permitted by law, Cortext Labs, Inc. disclaims all warranties, conditions and representations of any kind, whether express, implied or statutory, including any implied warranty of merchantability, satisfactory quality, fitness for a particular purpose, title, quiet enjoyment, non-infringement, or any warranty arising from a course of dealing or usage of trade.

Without limiting that, we do not warrant that:

• the platform will be uninterrupted, timely, secure or error-free;
• work matching your profile will be available at any time, in any volume, at any rate;
• assessments, gold sets, rubrics or automated scoring are free of error — they are not, which is why section 8 and the human review route in the privacy policy exist;
• a client will accept any particular deliverable, or that a project will run for its estimated duration;
• any content you access through the platform is accurate, complete or suitable for any purpose, including model outputs, which are frequently wrong on purpose.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties or of implied statutory rights. Where that is so, the exclusions above apply only to the extent permitted, and nothing in these terms removes a right you have under mandatory local law.

17Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, neither Cortext Labs, Inc. nor its officers, directors, employees, agents or clients will be liable to you for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, punitive or exemplary damages, or for any loss of profit, revenue, business, opportunity, goodwill, anticipated savings or data, however caused and on any theory of liability, whether in contract, tort (including negligence), strict liability or otherwise, even if we were advised of the possibility.

Aggregate cap. Our total liability to you for all claims arising out of or relating to these terms or the platform is limited to the greater of (a) the total amounts Cortext Labs, Inc. paid you in the six months immediately before the event giving rise to the claim, and (b) five hundred US dollars ($500).

What the cap does not touch. Nothing in this section limits or excludes:

• our obligation to pay you for hours and items accepted under section 7. Money you have earned is not capped, and we will not argue that it is;
• liability for our own fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation;
• liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence;
• liability for wilful misconduct or gross negligence;
• any liability that cannot be limited or excluded under the law that applies to you.

These limits apply even if a limited remedy fails of its essential purpose, and they reflect an agreed allocation of risk between two commercial parties which is part of the basis on which rates are set.

18Indemnification

You will indemnify, defend and hold harmless Cortext Labs, Inc., its affiliates, and the clients to whom your Work Product is delivered, together with their officers, directors and employees, from and against any third-party claim, and any resulting loss, liability, damage, judgment, settlement, cost and reasonable legal fee, arising out of or relating to:

• your breach of these terms, an engagement letter, or a confidentiality agreement;
• a claim that Work Product you delivered infringes or misappropriates a third party’s intellectual property or other rights, or breaches an obligation you owed to an employer or another client;
• personal data about a third party that you introduced into a submission in breach of section 13;
• any tax, contribution or penalty properly payable by you under section 9 that an authority seeks from us instead;
• your violation of law, or of a professional obligation you are subject to.

We will notify you promptly of a claim, though a delay only relieves you to the extent it actually prejudices your defence. We may take control of the defence with counsel of our choosing, in which case you will co-operate and you remain responsible for reasonable costs. You may not settle a claim in a way that imposes an obligation or an admission on Cortext Labs, Inc. or a client without our prior written consent, which we will not unreasonably withhold. The cap in section 17 limits our liability to you and does not limit your obligations under this section.

19Dispute resolution, arbitration and class-action waiver

Step one: informal resolution, and it is mandatory

Before either party starts arbitration or a lawsuit, it must send a Notice of Dispute. Yours goes to legal@cortext-ai.ukwith the subject line “Notice of Dispute”, and must include your name, the email address on your account, a description of what happened and what you want. Ours goes to the address on your account. Either party may request a telephone-free video conference within 30 days, which the other must attend in good faith, and which either party may attend with counsel.

Neither party may begin arbitration until 60 days after the Notice of Dispute is sent, or until the other party confirms the dispute is not resolvable, whichever is sooner. Any limitation period is paused for that time. Most disputes end here: an hour adjustment under section 8 and a payment fault under section 7 both have faster routes, and neither of them requires a lawyer.

Step two: binding individual arbitration

If informal resolution fails, any dispute arising out of or relating to these terms, the platform, an engagement or your relationship with Cortext will be resolved by binding arbitration administered by JAMS under its Streamlined Arbitration Rules and Procedures, before a single arbitrator. This agreement to arbitrate is governed by the Federal Arbitration Act, 9 U.S.C. sections 1 et seq. The arbitrator decides all issues, except that a court decides whether the class-action waiver below is enforceable.

• Seat and hearing. The legal seat is San Francisco, California. You may elect to have the hearing conducted by video, or on documents only, or in person in the federal judicial district where you live. We will not object to any of those choices, and we will not require you to travel.
• Costs. For claims under $25,000, Cortext Labs, Inc.pays the JAMS filing, administrative and arbitrator fees in excess of what you would have paid to file in court. Each party bears its own legal fees unless a statute or the arbitrator’s award provides otherwise.
• Award. The arbitrator may award any relief a court could award to that individual, including statutory damages, and must issue a reasoned written decision. Judgment on the award may be entered in any court of competent jurisdiction.

Class-action waiver

You and Cortext Labs, Inc. agree to bring claims only in an individual capacity, and not as a plaintiff or class member in any purported class, collective, coordinated, consolidated, private attorney general or representative proceeding. The arbitrator may not consolidate the claims of more than one person and may not preside over any form of representative proceeding. If this waiver is found unenforceable as to a particular claim or a particular request for relief, then that claim or request must proceed in court under section 20 and is severed from the arbitration, while every other claim continues in arbitration.

Carve-outs — disputes that never have to be arbitrated

• Small claims. Either party may bring an individual claim in a small claims court with jurisdiction, and does not have to arbitrate it or send a Notice of Dispute first.
• Injunctive relief for IP and confidentiality. Either party may seek temporary or preliminary injunctive relief in court to protect intellectual property or confidential information, without waiving the rest of this section.
• Regulators. Nothing here prevents you from filing a complaint with, or participating in an investigation by, a government agency, a data protection supervisory authority, a labour authority or a professional regulator. Those rights cannot be waived, and this agreement does not attempt to.

How to opt out of arbitration

You may reject the arbitration agreement and the class-action waiver — and keep your account, your engagements and your rate exactly as they are.

• Email legal@cortext-ai.uk with the subject line “Arbitration Opt-Out”, from the address on your account, including your full name and a statement that you are opting out of the arbitration agreement in these terms.
• Send it within 30 days of creating your account. If you already had an account when a version of these terms first introduced arbitration, the 30 days run from the effective date of that version.
• We will confirm receipt in writing within 5 business days. Keep that confirmation.
• Opting out costs nothing, is not held against you in matching or review, and cannot be grounds for any adverse action. If it ever were, that would itself be a breach of these terms by us.
• If you opt out, disputes go to the courts identified in section 20. Everything else in these terms continues to apply.

If we amend this section, the amendment does not apply to a dispute of which we already had notice, and a new 30-day opt-out window opens for the amended text.

20Governing law and venue

These terms, and any dispute arising out of or relating to them or to your relationship with Cortext, are governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules — Delaware being the state in which Cortext Labs, Inc. is incorporated. The Federal Arbitration Act governs section 19. The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply.

Where a dispute is not subject to arbitration — because you opted out, because it falls within a carve-out, or because the arbitration agreement is held unenforceable — it will be brought exclusively in the state or federal courts located in San Francisco County, California, and both parties submit to the personal jurisdiction of those courts and waive any objection based on venue or forum non conveniens.

If you live outside the United States, this section does not deprive you of the protection of any mandatory provision of the law of your country of residence that cannot be derogated from by agreement, and does not prevent you bringing proceedings in your home courts where the law gives you that right regardless of what a contract says.

21Changes to these terms

This is version 4.2, published 18 June 2026 and effective 20 July 2026, superseding version 4.1, effective 15 january 2026. The version number and both dates are printed at the top of this page so you can tell at a glance which text you agreed to.

For any material change — to rates or payout mechanics, to section 10, section 11, section 19 or section 20, or to anything that reduces what you are owed or widens what you give up — we give at least 30days’ notice before the new version takes effect. Notice goes by email to the address on your account and appears in the product, and it summarises what changed rather than sending you to diff two documents.

Non-material changes — corrections, clarifications, updated contact addresses — take effect on publication.

• Continuing to use the platform on or after the effective date accepts the new version.
• If you do not accept it, stop accepting engagements and close your account before the effective date. Nothing is forfeited: work already accepted is paid in the normal run.
• An engagement you accepted before the effective date continues under the version in force when you accepted it, until that engagement ends. We do not change the rules underneath work in progress.
• Prior versions are archived; request a copy from legal@cortext-ai.uk.

22Assignment

You may not assign, transfer, delegate or subcontract these terms, an engagement, or any right or obligation under either, whether by operation of law or otherwise. Any attempt to do so is void. This follows from section 2: the engagement is personal to you, and the whole premise of the marketplace is that a specific verified expert did the work.

Cortext Labs, Inc. may assign these terms in whole or in part, without your consent, to an affiliate, or in connection with a merger, acquisition, corporate reorganisation or sale of all or substantially all of its assets. An assignment does not reduce, delay or discharge any payment obligation that had already accrued to you before it took effect, and the assignee takes those obligations with the rest. Where an assignment changes who controls your personal data, the privacy policy requires us to tell you before your data is processed under a different notice.

23Severability, waiver and entire agreement

Entire agreement

These terms, the engagement letter for each engagement, any confidentiality or IP assignment agreement you sign, the Privacy Policy and the Cookie Policy are the entire agreement between you and Cortext Labs, Inc., and supersede every prior or contemporaneous understanding on the same subject, including anything said in a recruiting conversation. Where documents conflict, the order of precedence is: the engagement letter for that engagement, then any signed confidentiality or IP agreement, then these terms, then the policies.

Severability and waiver

If any provision is held invalid or unenforceable, it is modified to the minimum extent necessary to make it enforceable, or severed if it cannot be, and the rest continues in full force. The exception is the class-action waiver in section 19, which has its own severability rule. A failure or delay in enforcing a provision is not a waiver of it, and a waiver on one occasion is not a waiver on another; no waiver is effective unless in writing.

Third parties, notices, force majeure and language

• Third-party beneficiaries. There are none, except that clients are intended beneficiaries of section 10, section 11 and section 18 and may enforce them directly.
• Notices. Ours to you go to the email address on your account and are effective when sent. Yours to us go to legal@cortext-ai.uk and are effective on receipt, with a copy by post to 1 Sansome Street, Suite 3500, San Francisco, CA 94104, United States where a statute requires written notice.
• Electronic agreement. You consent to contract electronically, to receive all notices, disclosures and tax documents electronically, and to the use of electronic signatures. You can withdraw consent to electronic tax documents by writing to payments@cortext-ai.uk, and we will post them instead.
• Force majeure. Neither party is liable for a failure caused by an event beyond its reasonable control, except that this never excuses payment for work already accepted.
• Headings and language. Headings are for convenience only. These terms are written in English; where we provide a translation, the English version controls.

24Notices and contact

Cortext Labs, Inc., 1 Sansome Street, Suite 3500, San Francisco, CA 94104, United States. Incorporated in Delaware, United States. Every channel below is email; Cortext operates no telephone support line and no telephone verification, so a phone call is never how we contact you and never how you reach us.

• Legal notices, arbitration opt-outs, prior versions — legal@cortext-ai.uk
• Pay, payouts, tax forms, hour disputes — payments@cortext-ai.uk
• Trust and safety, fraud, impersonation, safety concerns — trust@cortext-ai.uk
• Security vulnerabilities and account compromise — security@cortext-ai.uk
• Privacy requests and the data protection officer — see the privacy policy
• Referral programme — referrals@cortext-ai.uk
• Everything else — support@cortext-ai.uk