Terms of Service

Effective 21 October 2026.

The agreement

These terms are an agreement between you and benchturn, Inc. (“benchturn”, “we”, “us”). They cover benchturn.com, the benchturn command-line tool (“the CLI”), the account portal, and payouts (together, “the service”). By installing the CLI, signing in, submitting a session or otherwise using the service, you agree to these terms and to our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, do not use the service.

Who can use benchturn

You may use benchturn only if:

• you are at least 18 years old;
• you are not located in, ordinarily resident in, or a national of a country or region subject to comprehensive US sanctions, and you are not on a US government list of sanctioned or restricted persons; and
• you can legally receive payments from a US company where you live.

Your account

You sign in with GitHub or sign up with an email address. Keep your account and your machines’ access secure; you are responsible for what happens under your account, including sessions recorded on machines you connected. Tell us at hello@benchturn.com if you think your account has been misused. One person, one account: do not share an account or create accounts for others.

How benchturn works

Once installed, the CLI records your sessions in the coding agents you connected and uploads them in the background, as described in the docs and the Privacy Policy. You can also submit sessions from before you installed (“past sessions”). We review what you upload, turn suitable sessions on public repositories into training and evaluation environments, and license those environments to AI labs. We may change, add or remove features, and we do not promise that any session will be accepted or licensed, or when.

What you may submit

Recording and submitting a session means sending us the material in it. You may only do that with work you have the right to share. In particular:

• Submit your own work on open-source projects.
• Do not submit your employer’s or a client’s confidential or proprietary work, or anything you are bound by contract to keep private. If your work is covered by an employment or contractor agreement, it is up to you to make sure you are allowed to share it.
• Do not submit other people’s secrets, credentials or personal data, or material you do not have the right to share.
• You are responsible for removing secrets and private material. Files named like secrets are left out of snapshots, but prompts and transcripts are recorded as they are. Use benchturn pause or a .gen-ignore file for work that should not be recorded. We redact what we find during review, but we do not guarantee that we will find everything.

You represent that you have the rights needed to grant the license below for everything you submit, and that our use of it as these terms allow will not infringe anyone’s rights or break any law or agreement.

Ownership and the license you grant

You keep ownership of your work. Code in a repository stays under its own open-source license; nothing here changes that license or gives us more rights in that code than the license already gives everyone.

For the sessions you record or submit through the CLI (your prompts, the agent’s replies, transcripts, snapshots and the notes you add), you grant benchturn a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license, other than the payments described below, to use, copy, store, reproduce, modify, adapt and create training and evaluation environments and derivative datasets from them, and to distribute, sell and license those environments and datasets. You allow us to sublicense these rights to AI labs and to the service providers who help us run benchturn.

The license is perpetual. You may withdraw a session that has not been licensed to a lab by deleting it or asking us to; for a session that has been licensed to a lab, the license is irrevocable, and labs may keep and use what they licensed under their agreements with us.

A lab receives the public repository, the prompts and the transcript, with no account information attached. We do not need to credit you, and you give up any claim to be identified as the author of what labs receive, to the extent the law allows.

Contribute-form submissions

Sessions sent through the contribute form are different. As the form says, we use them only to review whether they are a fit, and the license above does not apply to them. If we want to use one, we will ask you first and agree terms, including payment, separately.

Review and rejection

We review every session and decide, at our discretion, whether to accept it, build an environment from it, list it or license it. We may reject any session for any reason, including that it is not on a public repository, does not involve real code changes, contains private material, or appears to break these terms. Past sessions we decline are deleted. We may remove material from a session, such as secrets or personal data, before using it.

Payments

• A share of each sale. When an environment built from your session is licensed to a lab, you earn the share of the sale price shown in your account or offered to you.
• Welcome payment. Where an invite says so, you earn a one-time welcome payment (for example, $20 after your first three sessions are received). It applies only if your invite offers it.
• Past sessions. An accepted past session earns a share of the sale when an environment built from it is licensed. Accepting a past session does not by itself pay a fixed amount.
• Currency and schedule. Amounts are in US dollars. We pay on the 1st of each month for everything owed by the 25th of the month before.
• Methods. We pay through Stripe: you set up a Stripe account from your account page or with benchturn payouts, and Stripe pays what you earn into your bank account. Your use of Stripe is subject to the Stripe Connected Account Agreement. Where Stripe cannot pay out to your country, we pay through PayPal or Wise instead. You must give accurate payout details; the provider’s own terms and fees apply. If we cannot pay you because your details are missing or wrong, the amount stays owed until they are fixed.
• Taxes. You are responsible for any taxes on what you earn. Stripe collects the tax information we need when you set up payouts, and in the US sends you a Form 1099 where the law requires one. We may ask you for other tax forms or information, and may hold payments until we have them.
• Withholding. We may withhold or cancel amounts connected to fraud, to sessions that break these terms, or where paying you would violate sanctions or other law.

You are an independent contributor, not an employee, agent or partner of benchturn, and you are not entitled to any payment except as described here.

Acceptable use

Do not:

• submit fabricated, generated or manipulated sessions presented as real work, or game review or payments in any other way;
• create multiple accounts, or use someone else’s account or invite code without their permission;
• submit malware, or material that is illegal or infringes anyone’s rights;
• interfere with, probe, overload or attack the service, or access it other than through the interfaces we provide;
• use the service to harass anyone or to violate anyone’s privacy.

The CLI

benchturn grants you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable license to use the CLI to take part in the service. To record sessions, the CLI changes your machine:

• it adds hooks to the settings of the coding agents it connects (such as Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot CLI, Cline, Pi and OpenCode);
• it raises Claude Code’s cleanupPeriodDays and turns off Gemini CLI’s session retention, so those agents stop deleting your session files after 30 days;
• it installs a background timer that uploads recordings, and keeps local copies of captures in its own directory.

benchturn uninstall removes the hooks and reverts the retention settings it changed. Back up your agents’ settings if you rely on them. You use the CLI at your own risk, subject to the disclaimers below.

Privacy

Our Privacy Policy explains what we collect and how we use it, and is part of these terms.

Ending the agreement

You can stop at any time: run benchturn uninstall, and email hello@benchturn.com if you also want your account deleted. We may suspend or end your access at any time, including if you break these terms, and will tell you unless we are legally or practically unable to. When the agreement ends, we pay amounts properly owed to you under these terms, except amounts withheld as described above. The license for sessions already licensed to a lab, and the sections on ownership and the license, payments owed, disclaimers, limitation of liability, indemnity and governing law, survive the end of the agreement.

Disclaimers

THE SERVICE, INCLUDING THE CLI, IS PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE”, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, WHETHER EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, INCLUDING WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. WE DO NOT WARRANT THAT THE SERVICE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, ERROR-FREE OR SECURE, THAT THE CLI WILL NOT AFFECT YOUR OTHER SOFTWARE, OR THAT ANY SESSION WILL BE ACCEPTED, LICENSED OR PAID FOR.

Limitation of liability

TO THE FULLEST EXTENT THE LAW ALLOWS, BENCHTURN WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR LOST PROFITS, REVENUE, DATA OR GOODWILL, ARISING OUT OF OR RELATED TO THE SERVICE OR THESE TERMS, EVEN IF WE WERE TOLD THEY WERE POSSIBLE. OUR TOTAL LIABILITY FOR ALL CLAIMS ARISING OUT OF OR RELATED TO THE SERVICE OR THESE TERMS IS LIMITED TO THE GREATER OF THE AMOUNTS WE PAID YOU IN THE 12 MONTHS BEFORE THE CLAIM AROSE AND 100 US DOLLARS.

Some jurisdictions do not allow some of these exclusions or limits, so they may not all apply to you.

Indemnity

You will defend, indemnify and hold harmless benchturn and its officers, employees and agents from claims, damages, losses and costs, including reasonable legal fees, arising from material you submitted, your breach of these terms, or your violation of any law or anyone’s rights, including claims that you shared work you had no right to share.

Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. Any dispute arising out of or related to these terms or the service will be resolved exclusively in the state or federal courts located in San Francisco County, California, and you and benchturn consent to their jurisdiction. Nothing here takes away rights you have under the mandatory consumer-protection law of the place you live.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. We will post the new version here with a new effective date, and tell account holders by email before a material change takes effect. If you keep using the service after a change takes effect, you accept the new terms. A change does not affect the license for sessions already licensed to a lab or payments already owed.

General

These terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between you and benchturn about the service. If a provision is found unenforceable, the rest stays in effect. Our not enforcing a provision is not a waiver. You may not transfer these terms without our consent; we may transfer them as part of a merger, acquisition or sale of our business. Neither of us is responsible for delays caused by events beyond reasonable control.

Contact

benchturn, Inc.
hello@benchturn.com