Shubo

Legal

Terms of Service

Last updated 15 August 2026

1. Agreement

These terms govern your use of Shubo, a service provided by A40 Labs, Inc., a Delaware corporation (“we”, “us”). By using Shubo you agree to them. If you do not agree, do not use the service.

2. The service

Shubo is a research workspace. You bring in a library of sources, read and annotate them, ask questions across them, and draft writing from them with citations that point back to the passages they came from. Access is currently by invitation while the service is in early access, and features may change while it is.

3. Your account

You must give accurate information when you sign up, and you are responsible for what happens under your account and for keeping your credentials secure. An invitation is for you; do not share your account with anyone else. You also need to be old enough to enter a contract where you live, or to have permission from someone who is.

4. Acceptable use

You will not (and will not permit anyone else to):

  • use Shubo for anything unlawful;
  • upload material you do not have the right to upload, or use Shubo as a way to store or pass on copies of material to people who have no right to it;
  • reverse-engineer, disassemble, or copy any part of the service;
  • retrieve content from the service systematically, by scraping, data mining, robots or any other automated means, to assemble a collection, database or training set;
  • access the service to build a competing product;
  • resell, rent, or otherwise commercially exploit the service;
  • interfere with or disrupt the service or its security.

5. Your library

What you bring in stays yours. You grant us only the limited licence needed to run the service for you: to store, process, index and display your content, as described in the Privacy Policy. We claim no other rights in it. We do not share it with other users, and we do not use it to train or improve models, ours or anyone else’s.

You are responsible for having the right to upload what you upload. Research libraries are largely made of work published by other people: whether you may keep a copy of a given paper, and what you may do with it, is between you and whoever holds its rights. Shubo gives you tools for working with your sources; it does not give you any right in them that you did not already have.

6. Bringing a library in

Shubo can import from reference managers and other services you already use. Those services have their own terms, and connecting one does not change them: what you may do with what you export from Zotero, Mendeley, a publisher, or anywhere else is governed by whatever you agreed with them. We are not responsible for a third-party service being available, or for what it does with a request you make of it.

7. Storage and your own copies

We take routine backups, and they are for keeping the service running rather than for restoring one person’s file on request. Keep your own copies of anything you would hate to lose. Your library came from somewhere, and your drafts are the work: neither should exist only here.

There are limits to what one account can store, and we may ask you to reduce a library, or remove uploads, where their size is out of proportion to what the service can reasonably carry. We would rather tell you first, and will where we can.

8. Our service

The software, design, and content of the service are ours and stay ours. These terms grant you a licence to use Shubo, and nothing more.

If you send us an idea, a suggestion or a bug report, we may act on it freely and without owing you anything for it. This is about feedback on Shubo only. It has nothing to do with your library or your writing, which section 5 covers and which stay yours.

9. Citations and AI output

Shubo drafts text and attaches citations that point back to the passage each claim was drawn from. Traceability is a property of the link, not a promise about the claim. Following a citation shows you the source it came from; deciding whether that source actually supports the sentence is your work, and remains your work.

Output is yours to use, including in work you publish or submit. You are responsible for what you submit and for checking it.

Universities, funders and journals set their own rules about AI assistance, and many now require it to be disclosed. Those rules are yours to follow, and they are the ones that count: using Shubo does not satisfy them, and nothing here overrides them.

10. Payment

Early access is free. If we introduce paid plans, the price and what it covers will be shown before you are asked to pay, and the terms of that purchase will apply alongside these.

11. Disclaimers

Shubo is provided “as is”, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. We do not guarantee that the service is uninterrupted or error-free.

12. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, A40 Labs, Inc. is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, or consequential damages, and our aggregate liability arising out of the service is limited to the greater of the amounts you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or US$100.

13. Indemnity

If someone brings a claim against us because of material you uploaded or something you did with the service that these terms do not permit, you will cover our reasonable costs in dealing with it. This is the other side of section 5: you decide what enters your library, and we have no way to know what right you hold in it.

14. Changes to the service

Shubo will change. Features come and go, particularly while it is in early access, and we may stop offering parts of it.

If we discontinue the service altogether, we will tell you before it happens and give you a way to take your library and your writing with you. You handed us the sources behind your work; the least we owe you is not to close a door on them without warning.

15. Ending your account

You may stop using Shubo at any time. To close your account and have your data removed, email hello@a40.ai, and we will delete your library, your notes and your account within 30 days. We may suspend or end access for breach of these terms.

16. Disputes

If something goes wrong, write to us first. We will each try to resolve it informally, and neither of us will start a formal proceeding for at least 30 days after that first message — most things are settled faster by a person reading the email.

If that fails, disputes arising out of these terms or the service are settled by binding arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association under its Commercial Arbitration Rules, seated in Delaware. Arbitration is on an individual basis: claims are not brought as a class action, and an arbitrator may not consolidate more than one person’s claims.

Two things sit outside this. Either of us may bring a claim in court about intellectual property, or seek an injunction to stop something urgently; and either of us may bring an individual claim in a small claims court if it qualifies.

Where the law of your country gives you rights this section cannot take away, it does not. Consumers in some places, including the EU and the UK, cannot be required to give up access to their own courts in advance. If that is you, this section does not apply to you, and the rest of these terms still stand.

17. General

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, USA. You may not assign these terms without our consent; we may assign them as part of a corporate transaction. If any provision is found unenforceable, the rest remains in effect. We may update these terms; if the changes are material, we will announce them on this page before they take effect. These terms are the entire agreement between us about the service.

18. Contact

Questions: hello@a40.ai.