End-User Terms for Alan Services

Note

For reasons of readability and accessibility, we use the generic masculine below irrespective of gender (m/f/d).

Welcome to Alan, a cloud- and AI-based service of Comma Soft AG, Pützchens Chaussee 202-204a, 53229 Bonn (“Comma Soft” or “we”), which allows you to communicate via a chat interface in order to receive statistically likely answers to your queries.

If these Terms of Use are displayed to you, you are using Alan either as part of a free trial or under a paid Alan service agreement that we have concluded with you or with the company (“Contracting Party”) that has enabled your access to Alan, e.g., your employer.

When using Alan, our following Terms of Use apply - in the case of paid agreements in addition to the remunerated main contract - which you must accept before using Alan. These Terms of Use apply regardless of any policies the Contracting Party (possibly via an AI or employee policy) has itself established with respect to the use of Alan. If you have questions about internal corporate AI usage, please contact the company through which you obtain Alan.

1. Registration / Account Creation

1.1. Any use of Alan requires registration and the creation of a customer account of the Contracting Party as well as internet access via a market-standard, up-to-date web browser.

1.2. If Alan is provided to you by our Contracting Party under paid agreements, you may use Alan to the extent of the respective main contract and the access rights granted to you by our Contracting Party / administrator.

2. Responsibility for Access Credentials

2.1. Where access to Alan is via credentials, you must keep these confidential and not make them accessible to unauthorised third parties.

2.2. It is your responsibility to ensure that your personal access to Alan and use of Alan via an account assigned to you is carried out by you personally only. If there is a risk that unauthorised third parties have obtained or will obtain knowledge of your access credentials, you must inform us without delay.

3. Scope of the Offering

3.1. Alan is a cloud-based AI solution based on large language models (LLMs) that enables authorised users to submit queries via a chat interface. Alan answers queries by compiling various pieces of information and response modules and mapping them to the keywords recognised by Alan. In doing so, Alan accesses the available (proprietary) knowledge sources (if configured) and its training knowledge.

3.2. Alan’s output (response) is expressly for support and orientation only and is not legally binding. In particular, answers do not constitute warranted characteristics or guarantees.

4. Elevated Duty of Care for Users

Alan relies on so-called Large Language Models (LLMs). These are computational linguistic probability models; i.e., answers are based solely on statistical probabilities. They may therefore be erroneous and/or incomplete. We point out that, due to the error-proneness of AI technologies, you as a user are subject to higher standards of care than when dealing with a natural person. When using Alan, you must exercise the care of a particularly careful and conscientious user. In particular, you are obliged to subject all results output by Alan to a plausibility check and, in cases of obvious incorrectness, to notify us (if you are our Contracting Party) or the Contracting Party that provides Alan to you. If you fail to comply with this duty to cooperate, or do so inadequately, this may lead to contributory negligence and a reduction of our liability.

5. Scope of Permitted Use

5.1. Your right to use is limited to access to Alan and to the use of the services and functions assigned to you by us or by our Contracting Party or authorised administrator in the course of your professional activities, based on the main contract concluded between us and the Contracting Party and these Terms of Use. The use of Alan for private purposes is prohibited.

5.2. Where available as functionality, you may, subject to the provisions below, upload content to Alan in order to generate answers via Alan.

5.3. By making content available, you grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free right of use to the respective content insofar as this is necessary to perform the functionalities offered by Alan, and you warrant that you are entitled to grant such rights.

5.4. You are responsible for the content and data you provide. We do not review content for completeness, accuracy, legality, timeliness, quality, or fitness for a particular purpose. The same applies to connected company-internal knowledge sources (data pools).

6. Prohibited Activities

6.1. You are prohibited from any activities in connection with Alan that violate applicable law or infringe the rights of third parties or may do so. In particular, the following actions are prohibited:

• uploading content that violates data-protection law and/or other law and/or fraudulent content;
• using or providing content that is legally protected or burdened with third-party rights (e.g., copyrights and trademarks) without being expressly authorised to do so;
• using Alan for prohibited practices within the meaning of Art. 5 AI Act;
• using Alan in high-risk areas within the meaning of Annex 1 and Annex 3 of the AI Act;
• use for the purpose of automated final decision-making;
• actions that violate good morals and the principle of good faith.

6.2. Irrespective of any legal violation, you are also prohibited from actions that could block, overload, or impair the proper functioning or appearance of the Alan services (e.g., denial-of-service attacks or uploading viruses or other malicious code) or that are aimed at reverse engineering.

6.3. If you become aware of illegal, abusive, contractual, or otherwise unauthorised use of Alan, please contact Comma Soft support.

6.4. If there is suspicion of unlawful or criminal acts, we are entitled and, where applicable, obliged to review your activities and to take further appropriate legal steps.

7. Blocking Access

Taking your legitimate interests into account, we may temporarily or permanently block your access to Alan if there are concrete indications that you are violating these Terms of Use and/or applicable law.

8. Limitation of Liability

8.1. We are liable for damages or reimbursement of futile expenses without limitation only in cases of intent or gross negligence, for injury to life, body, or health, under the provisions of the Product Liability Act, to the extent of a guarantee assumed by us, for claims due to the absence of warranted characteristics, or in cases of fraud.

8.2. In the event of slightly negligent breach of a duty essential for achieving the purpose of the contract (cardinal duty), our liability per damage event is limited to the damage that is foreseeable and typical for the type of business in question.

8.3. Liability for data loss is limited to the typical restoration effort that would have occurred with regular and risk-appropriate backups, unless one of the conditions under Sections 8.1 or 8.2 applies.

8.4. We are not liable for the functionality of the telecommunications connection (telephone / ISDN / DSL lines, etc.) to the server in the event of power failures or outages of servers outside our sphere of influence. We are also not liable for damages caused by force majeure or comparable events. Comparable events include, in particular, strikes, official orders, pandemics, epidemics, failure of telecommunications networks or gateways of other operators, as well as disruptions in the area of other telecommunications or service providers.

8.5. Our no-fault liability for damages (§ 536a BGB) for defects existing at the time the contract is concluded is excluded. Sections 8.1 and 8.2 of these Terms of Use remain unaffected.

8.6. No further liability exists. The defence of contributory negligence remains unaffected.

8.7. The above limitation of liability also applies to the personal liability of our employees, representatives, corporate bodies, and vicarious agents.

9. Data Protection

In the context of using our services, we process the personal data of our users insofar as this is permitted by law. If you are our direct Contracting Party, we process your contract data as a controller. If you use the service as an authorised user of our Contracting Party, we act only as a processor within the meaning of Art. 28 GDPR. In this case, the controller under data-protection law is the company that has made Alan available to you. Data-subject rights must then be asserted directly against that company. Detailed information on how we process your personal data when you use our services and what rights you have can be found in our privacy notice at https://app.alan.de/docs/en/privacy.

10. Termination / Account Deletion

If you have your own user account, it is available to you for the duration of the free trial or, alternatively, for the term of the main contract that we have concluded with you or the respective Contracting Party. Upon termination of the trial / main contract, we delete the account.

11. Miscellaneous

If any provision of these Terms of Use is or becomes invalid, the legal validity of the remaining provisions shall not be affected. The same applies if the contract contains a gap.

12. Language

This Agreement has been prepared in German and English. In the event of any inconsistency, discrepancy, or ambiguity between the German and English versions, the German version shall prevail. The English version is provided for convenience only.