SopalAI Terms of Use

1. Scope and relationship to other terms

These SopalAI Terms of Use govern your access to and use of the SopalAI feature available at sopal.com.au/ai ("SopalAI").

They are additional to, and incorporated into, our general Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Where there is any inconsistency on a SopalAI-specific issue, these Terms of Use prevail over the general Terms of Service.

By submitting any question or content to SopalAI, you acknowledge that you have read, understood, and agreed to these Terms of Use.

2. What SopalAI is (and isn't)

SopalAI is a domain-specific research tool. It is engineered to answer questions about Queensland security-of-payment law by:

• retrieving on-point text from a curated corpus of statutes and Queensland judgments;
• passing that text to a large language model under tight constraints;
• composing an answer with mechanically-verified verbatim quotes and footnoted citations to the underlying primary sources.

SopalAI is not:

• a substitute for a lawyer or for independent legal advice;
• a court filing system, document management system, or formal record;
• warranted to be exhaustive of every relevant authority on any topic; or
• a guarantee that the law as stated in any answer is current, accurate, or applicable to your specific facts.

3. Sources SopalAI relies on

SopalAI's primary sources include:

• the Building Industry Fairness (Security of Payment) Act 2017 (Qld) and its Regulation;
• the Queensland Building and Construction Commission Act 1991 and its Regulation;
• the Acts Interpretation Act 1954 (Qld); and
• the Queensland line of judgments interpreting those Acts (Queensland Supreme Court, Court of Appeal, and District Court decisions).

Our corpus is a snapshot taken at a particular date and is not updated in real time. New decisions, statutory amendments, or commencement of provisions occurring after the snapshot date will not be reflected in answers.

4. Hallucinations, errors, and accuracy

SopalAI is engineered with several mechanisms aimed at reducing — but not eliminating — these risks:

• quotes are mechanically extracted verbatim from the underlying chunks rather than being generated by the language model, so quoted passages match their source text;
• citation markers point to specific paragraphs of judgments or sections of statutes that you can open and read in full;
• a knowledge-augmented planner names provisions and authorities, and a separate retrieval layer resolves those names against the indexed corpus before any answer is composed.

Notwithstanding these design measures:

• no machine-learning system is free from error;
• retrieval can miss relevant material that exists in the corpus;
• the corpus itself may not contain every relevant authority;
• the language model can mis-characterise on-point material or apply it to a question in a way a careful lawyer would not; and
• citation markers may, in edge cases, be applied to text that does not fully support the cited proposition.

You agree that the existence of these limitations is a known feature of large-language-model systems, that you are using SopalAI on this basis, and that no representation or warranty is made by Sopal that any output is correct, complete, or current.

5. Not legal advice

SopalAI provides research material. It does not provide legal advice and using SopalAI does not create a solicitor–client relationship between you and Sopal Australia. Always consult a qualified lawyer admitted in your jurisdiction before relying on SopalAI outputs in any matter that affects legal rights or obligations.

Without limitation, SopalAI does not:

• provide advice tailored to your specific facts, evidence, or strategy;
• assess privilege, conflicts, or confidentiality risk in your particular matter;
• guarantee compliance with court rules, contractual obligations, or professional obligations; or
• replace the judgment of a qualified legal practitioner.

6. Confidentiality of inputs

Any text you submit to SopalAI (including questions, follow-ups, and pasted excerpts) is transmitted to and processed by third-party large-language-model providers. Sopal Australia accepts no responsibility for the confidentiality of any information you submit through SopalAI. Treat the prompt box as a public input.

By submitting input to SopalAI you acknowledge and agree that:

• your input may be transmitted to and processed by one or more third-party language-model providers (see Section 7);
• the providers' own terms govern how that data is handled and may include logging, model improvement, or other processing;
• you should not submit privileged communications, client-identifying information, or any other material whose disclosure would be problematic;
• Sopal Australia is not your custodian for purposes of legal professional privilege and cannot guarantee that submission of material to SopalAI will not be treated as a waiver in any subsequent proceeding;
• you are solely responsible for ensuring that any information you submit may lawfully be disclosed to third-party processors and to Sopal.

7. Third-party language models and processors

SopalAI uses third-party large-language-model providers (currently including, without limitation, OpenAI and Anthropic) to plan, read, and compose answers. Your inputs and excerpts of indexed corpus material are sent to those providers for processing in real time.

The providers' own terms, privacy policies, and data-handling practices apply to that processing. Those terms may change. Sopal does not control, and is not responsible for, the providers' compliance with their own terms.

Sopal does not pay any provider on your behalf for use of SopalAI; usage caps in Section 9 reflect the cost of those provider calls.

8. Acceptable use

You agree not to use SopalAI for any of the following:

• generating content for use in any unlawful or fraudulent activity;
• attempting to extract, exfiltrate, or reverse-engineer the corpus, model weights, system prompts, or any other proprietary component;
• automated mass querying, scraping, or any use designed to circumvent the per-user usage caps;
• submitting content that is defamatory, harassing, infringing, or unlawful;
• generating content for the purpose of holding it out as legal advice given by a person other than yourself;
• any conduct designed to cause SopalAI to produce harmful, deceptive, or unlawful outputs; or
• any use that breaches the third-party providers' acceptable-use policies.

9. Usage limits, sign-in, and enterprise access

Access to SopalAI is rate-limited:

• Anonymous users receive a small number of free questions to evaluate the tool. Once exhausted, you must sign in to continue.
• Signed-in users receive a fixed allowance of questions per UTC day. Once exhausted, you must wait until UTC midnight or arrange enterprise access.
• Enterprise access with higher or unmetered limits is available by arrangement — contact info@sopal.com.au.

Limits and pricing may change without notice. We may suspend or terminate access at our discretion, in particular where we believe usage is automated, abusive, or in breach of these Terms of Use.

10. Intellectual property and outputs

The SopalAI platform, including its system prompts, retrieval layer, indexes, and supporting code, is the property of Sopal Australia. You are granted a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to use the platform for personal or in-house professional research.

Statutes and judgments quoted by SopalAI are public-domain or government-published primary sources and are reproduced verbatim from their original form. Their use is subject to the original copyright and licensing terms of the publishing court or government body.

Subject to the third-party providers' own terms, you may use answers generated by SopalAI in your own work, provided you:

• do not represent the answer as having been authored or reviewed by a lawyer;
• independently verify any proposition or quotation before relying on it;
• do not redistribute the answer as a stand-alone product without express written permission; and
• preserve any citations to primary sources.

11. Disclaimers

SopalAI is provided on an "as is" and "as available" basis, without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied. Without limiting the foregoing, Sopal Australia disclaims all warranties of:

• accuracy, completeness, or currency of any output;
• fitness for any particular purpose, including any litigation, transactional, or compliance use;
• non-infringement of any third-party rights;
• uninterrupted or error-free availability of the service;
• compatibility with any particular browser, device, or assistive technology; and
• the safety, integrity, or confidentiality of any information you submit.

To the extent any warranties cannot be excluded under the Australian Consumer Law, our liability for breach of those warranties is limited as set out in Section 12.

12. Limitation of liability

Without limiting the generality of the above, we are not liable for:

• any reliance placed by you, your client, or any third party on a SopalAI output;
• any loss arising from a hallucinated, mis-cited, or otherwise incorrect output;
• any breach of confidence, privilege, or privacy resulting from your decision to submit material to SopalAI;
• any loss of profits, data, opportunity, goodwill, or anticipated savings;
• any costs of professional services arising from over-reliance on SopalAI; or
• any failure of the third-party language-model providers.

Our total aggregate liability to you for all claims relating to SopalAI is capped at AUD $100, regardless of the cause of action.

13. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless Sopal Australia, its affiliates, officers, employees, and contractors from and against any and all claims, demands, liabilities, losses, damages, costs, and expenses (including legal fees on a full-indemnity basis) arising out of or in connection with:

• your use of SopalAI;
• your reliance on, or republication of, any SopalAI output;
• any breach by you of these Terms of Use;
• any content you submit through SopalAI; and
• any third-party claim that your use of SopalAI infringed any right of that third party.

14. Changes to these terms

We may update these Terms of Use from time to time. The "Last updated" date at the top of this page shows when the most recent change took effect. Material changes will be highlighted on the SopalAI page. Continued use of SopalAI after a change takes effect constitutes acceptance of the changed terms.

15. Contact