Terms of use

01Who these terms are from

These terms are an agreement between you and Milo Shieber, doing business as Sovernity ("we", "us"). They cover Sovernity Ursa for Mac, which you download from this website, and the Ursa pages of sovernity.com. By installing or using Ursa for Mac, you agree to them. If you don't agree, please don't use it.

02Who can use Ursa

• You must be 18 or older.
• For adults 18+. May not be suitable for some minors.
• The first time you open Ursa, it asks you to confirm you're 18 or older. If you answer that you're under 18, Ursa goes no further for this install.

03What Ursa is, and what it isn't

Ursa is an AI that runs on your Mac. It can help you think things through. It can also be wrong, misunderstand you, or remember something incorrectly. You can read and correct what it has learned in What I know about you.

• Ursa is an AI, not a person or a therapist.
• It isn't medical, mental health, legal, financial or any other professional advice or care. Don't rely on it for decisions where a mistake could hurt you or someone else; talk to a qualified person.
• It isn't for emergencies. If you're in danger, call or text 988, or call 911. Elsewhere, call your local emergency number.
• Ursa isn't a crisis service. When it sees signs of a crisis, it doesn't write its own reply; it shows a fixed message and ways to reach people who can help. It can miss things, and it can't contact anyone for you. See the crisis protocol (/ursa/crisis-protocol/).

04Your use of Ursa

• We give you a personal, free, non-exclusive licence to install and use Ursa for Mac on Macs you own or control.
• Please don't use Ursa to break the law or to harm anyone.
• You're responsible for what you do with Ursa's replies.
• Don't redistribute modified copies of Ursa or present them as ours. The open-source parts inside Ursa keep their own licences (section 10), and nothing here limits your rights under them.

05Your data and your backups

Everything Ursa keeps is on your Mac, encrypted, and we have no copy (see the privacy policy, /ursa/privacy/). That means:

• We can't recover your data if your Mac is lost, damaged or erased, or if you delete it.
• Making backups is up to you. Ursa can make a password-locked backup file (Settings › Data › Back up). Keep the password: we can't recover it, and without it the backup can't be opened.
• An export (Settings › Data › Export) is not encrypted. Anyone who can open it can read it.
• If you use Tailscale to reach your Mac away from home, that's your own account with Tailscale, under Tailscale's terms.

06Free, and as-is

Ursa is free. It's provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy and non-infringement, to the extent the law allows. We don't promise that Ursa will be error-free, always available, or right about anything it says, or that the model download will always be available.

Ursa is a free showcase made by one person. It may have bugs, and it may change or stop being available. You use it at your own risk.

Some places don't allow these exclusions, so some of them may not apply to you.

07Limit on our responsibility

To the extent the law allows:

• We aren't liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost data, lost profits or harm arising from relying on Ursa's replies, even if we were told they were possible.
• Our total liability for anything to do with Ursa or this website is limited to the greater of what you paid us in the 12 months before the claim (Ursa is free, so usually nothing) or US$50.

Nothing in these terms limits liability that can't be limited by law.

08Updates, and ending use

• Updates are manual: download the new version from this website. Nothing updates by itself. We may stop making updates at any time.
• You can stop using Ursa at any time: delete your data (Settings › Data › Delete everything) and remove the app.
• Sections 5 to 7, 10 and 12 keep applying after you stop.

09The website

You're welcome to read and link to these pages. The Sovernity name and logo, the Sovernity Ursa name, the Big Dipper mark and the app icon are ours; please don't use them in a way that suggests we made or endorse something we didn't. The site's privacy is covered in the privacy policy.

Apple, iPhone, Mac, macOS and App Store are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries.

10Acknowledgements and licences

Ursa is built on open models and open-source software. Thank you to their authors. Each is used under its own licence; the full texts are in the app (Settings › About › Acknowledgements on Mac, Settings › Acknowledgements on iPhone).

AI models

• Gemma 4 12B by Google, Apache License 2.0. Converted to MLX and quantised to 4-bit by Sovernity from Google's original weights, and hosted at huggingface.co/SovernityHQ/gemma-4-12b-it-mlx-4bit. "Gemma" is a trademark of Google LLC; we use the name only to say which model Ursa runs. Google doesn't endorse Ursa.
• Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B by the Qwen team, Alibaba Cloud, Apache License 2.0. Converted to MLX and quantised (4-bit DWQ) by the mlx-community contributors, and hosted unchanged at huggingface.co/SovernityHQ/qwen3-embedding-0.6b-mlx-4bit-dwq.

Software in the Mac app

• MLX, MLX Swift and MLX Swift LM, by ml-explore (Apple's machine learning research team), MIT License.
• Swift Transformers, Swift Hugging Face and Swift Jinja, by Hugging Face, Apache License 2.0.
• GRDB, by Gwendal Roué, MIT License.
• SQLCipher, by Zetetic LLC, BSD-style licence (Community Edition).
• MarkdownUI and NetworkImage, by Guillermo Gonzalez, MIT License.
• swift-cmark, by John MacFarlane and the Swift project, BSD 2-Clause License.
• Swift Collections, Swift Numerics and Swift Crypto, by Apple, Apache License 2.0.
• EventSource, by Mattt, MIT License.
• yyjson, by YaoYuan, MIT License.

Typeface

• Fraunces, copyright 2018 The Fraunces Project Authors, SIL Open Font License 1.1. Used in the apps and on this website.

11Ursa for iPhone

Ursa for iPhone comes from the App Store, and Apple's Licensed Application End User License Agreement (the Standard EULA) applies to it. Sections 2 and 3 of these terms apply on iPhone too: it's for adults 18+, it's an AI and not a therapist or professional advice, and it isn't for emergencies. Section 10 credits the models and software it uses. Apple isn't responsible for Ursa or for supporting it; questions go to us (section 14).

12Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of New York, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules. Any dispute goes to the state or federal courts located in New York State, unless the law where you live gives you the right to bring it elsewhere.

If any part of these terms can't be enforced, the rest still applies. These terms and the privacy policy are the whole agreement between us about Ursa.

13Changes to these terms

If we change these terms, we'll post the new version here with a new effective date, and mention it in the release notes of the next version. Using a version released after a change means you accept the new terms. The terms that came with a version you already have keep applying to it.

14Contact

Milo Shieber, doing business as Sovernity · support@sovernity.com

Effective: 2026-10-08