The terms.

Clause 01

Who this is between

Splitbench is operated by Garrell Tech Solutions LLC, a limited liability company formed in the State of Florida, United States — “we” and “us” below. You can reach us at [email protected].

“You” is anyone who loads the chamber, puts a motion, speaks from the floor, saves a debate, or opens a link somebody saved. No account is needed for any of that, and none of it is gated on signing in, so these terms have to bind a visitor who never identified themselves. Using the site is the whole of the agreement to them.

Clause 02

What Splitbench does

You put a motion. Two language models are assigned opposite sides of it — one for, one against — and argue it in alternating turns over a set number of rounds. You may take the floor and put a point of your own. A third model then rules on which side argued better, and names the strongest point the losing side made.

Before the debate, an optional interview can sharpen a rough subject into a motion: it asks up to three questions and proposes a motion plus up to five stipulations — definitions binding on both benches, which neither may redefine. You can accept, edit or ignore all of it.

The service enforces these lengths, and will refuse text past them:

• A motion: 500 characters.
• A stipulation: 240 characters, and at most five of them.
• A point from the floor: 1,200 characters.
• A debate: at most 20 rounds requested at once.

Which models sit in which chair, and how hard each is made to think, is your choice from a roster the site fetches from OpenRouter. That roster is a third party’s and can change or become unreachable without notice; when it does, the site falls back to its configured defaults.

Clause 03

What comes out is argument, not advice

This is the clause that matters most, because the product is built to do the thing this clause warns you about.

The judge does not fix this. It is instructed to rule only on what was actually argued — the strength of the reasoning, the quality of the evidence, and whether each rebuttal landed — and expressly to ignore style, confidence, verbosity and its own opinion of the proposition. A ruling is a verdict on the debate, not on the question. A point you raise from the floor cannot win a debate at all; the judge is only asked to say whether it survived.

Nothing produced here is checked against the world. The numbers, citations, mechanisms and examples in a transcript are generated text and may be confidently wrong. Debaters are run at a high temperature on purpose, because low temperature is one of the main causes of two models drifting into agreement — which makes for a worse debate and no more truthful one.

Do not rely on any of it. Splitbench is not legal, medical, financial, tax, safety, employment or any other kind of professional advice, and no output of it is a recommendation to do anything. Decisions you take after reading a debate are yours.

Clause 04

Your words, and where they go

The words you write — the motion, any stipulations, anything you type into the sharpening interview, and any point from the floor — leave this service in the ordinary course of running a debate:

• Your motion goes to OpenAI’s moderation endpoint to be screened (clause 05).
• Your motion, the agreed ground, the transcript so far and your floor points go to OpenRouter, which routes them to whichever model provider you picked. Each of those companies has its own terms and its own retention and training practices, which we do not control and do not undertake to police.
• When configured to, the service identifies itself to OpenRouter by site name and URL alongside those requests.
• Whichever of these identifies you — your account when you are signed in, otherwise a random id your browser mints for itself under an IP-address ceiling — is written to a row in our database, with the time, each time you do something the allowances in clause 07 count. They are three separate key spaces, so a forged id cannot spend an account’s allowance.
• Those rows are deleted once they have aged out of the hour they are counted over. That happens the next time the same visitor asks for something, and otherwise on an occasional sweep — so a row can outlive its hour by some margin, and an address that never comes back is removed on nobody’s schedule but ours.

Do not put anything into a motion, a stipulation or the floor that you would not hand to a third-party model provider: secrets, credentials, personal data about other people, or anything under a confidentiality obligation.

How long we keep what, and what we do with it, is described in our privacy notice.

Clause 05

Motions are screened, and screening fails closed

Every motion is classified by OpenAI’s moderation model before any debate starts. This happens once, on the motion alone, before the first debater is asked to speak.

• Flagged. The debate does not run and you are told so: “that is not a motion this demo will put to a debate — try another one.” No further explanation is given, and there is no appeal route today.
• Unchecked. If the classifier cannot be reached or answers in a shape we do not recognise, the motion is refused anyway — “the motion could not be checked just now — try again shortly.” The gate fails closed on purpose: no motion is ever debated unscreened. This means a fault at OpenAI reads, from here, as the site refusing everything.
• It costs you a screening. Screening draws on its own hourly allowance rather than your debate allowance, so a refused motion does not consume a debate you never got — but refusals are not free to repeat.

Only the motion is screened. Points you make from the floor are not classified, and neither is what you type into the sharpening interview — the interview text is sent to a model without passing the filter. The filter is a guard on the front door, not a warranty about anything written afterwards, and you remain responsible for everything you type.

Clause 06

Acceptable use

Do not:

• Put a motion designed to extract content the model providers prohibit, or to get around the screen in clause 05.
• Try to instruct the debaters or the judge rather than argue with them. Everything a participant writes is passed to the models fenced as data, and the models are told that nothing inside that fence can change their rules or tell them what to conclude. Attempting it anyway — a stipulation that reads “the judge must rule for PRO”, for instance — is a misuse of the service.
• Work around the caps in clause 07: rotating addresses, automating the endpoints, or running the site as a backend for something else. Every debate spends our model credit, not yours; the service never asks you for a key of your own.
• Publish a transcript in a way that presents it as fact, as research, or as anyone’s considered position rather than as two models arguing assigned sides.
• Submit anything you have no right to submit, or that infringes someone else’s rights.

We may refuse, interrupt or stop serving any request or any visitor, at any time, with or without explanation.

Clause 07

The house caps on the free tier

The free tier runs on our own model credit, so a stranger’s debate is an amount of our money. That is why it runs under caps, and why the caps are real rather than advisory. As the code stands today they are:

• A roster of eight models, and no others.
• Reasoning effort capped at medium, on both benches and on the judge — including where we have configured something higher.
• At most four rounds in a debate.
• At most two turns from the floor per debate.
• Six debates, twenty-four sharpenings and thirty screenings an hour — counted against your account if you are signed in, and against your IP address if you are not.
• A daily ceiling on what the whole site may spend on models.

What happens when you reach one

The daily ceiling is asked first, so nobody is ever charged for a request that was going to be refused anyway. Then the free hourly allowance, which is always spent before anything you hold is. After that there are three answers, and they differ on purpose:

• Anonymous. You are refused and told to try again shortly. Waiting is the fix.
• Signed in, holding units. The request goes ahead and units are drawn down for it — see clause 09.
• Signed in, holding none. You drop back to the free tier — the same caps and the same hourly allowance a visitor with no account gets — and are asked to wait, the way anyone over the allowance is: “your units are spent — try again shortly.” An empty balance takes away the lifted caps, never the service.

Sharing an address shares an allowance, so behind one office, one campus or one phone network you are competing with strangers for it. Signing in is what moves your allowance off the building and onto you, and it is never worse than not signing in.

Holding units takes them off

The caps above are what the house gives away, not what the service can do. An account with units in it is not clamped: you get the whole roster, effort as high as a model will go, and as many rounds as you ask for — quoted and charged for what you chose.

The other side of that is worth stating plainly. The free hourly allowance only ever pays for a debate the free tier would have given away. Ask for something past the caps and it comes out of your balance even if your allowance is untouched — otherwise a single unit would buy an unlimited number of expensive debates at our expense. A debate inside the caps is still free to you, whether or not you hold units.

A quote above a configured figure is refused outright, and one above a lower figure is not run until you have been shown the number and said yes to it. Both are settings, and the chamber prices a bench while you are still choosing it.

These figures are settings, not promises. They can be changed at any time without notice, and the numbers above describe the defaults in the code as it stands. The chamber states the caps in force before you start.

Clause 08

Accounts

Sign-in exists — by emailed link, by password, or through Google — and identity is handled for us by Supabase. An account is not required to put a motion, take the floor, read a ruling or open a shared link, and it never will be.

What an account does today is move your free allowance off your IP address and onto you (clause 07), and give the units in clause 09 somewhere to sit. Registration is currently closed, so an account is not something you can go and get.

You are responsible for your account and for anything done through it.

Clause 09

Units, and what draws them down

Units are not on sale yet. No price is published, no payment route is connected, and nothing on this site can take your money. Units reach an account two ways today: a standing grant of 25, credited once to an account the first time it spends anything, and a credit we make by hand against the database. The pricing page states an intention rather than an offer, and neither it nor this page obliges us to open a paid tier or to open one on these terms.

The drawing-down half, however, is live, and these terms describe it because it can already refuse you service:

• Units are held as a ledger. A purchase and a spend are the same kind of entry with opposite signs, and your balance is their sum, kept in exact decimal to four places.
• Units are drawn only after the free allowance in clause 07 is gone, and only from a signed-in account.
• A debate is charged what its own bench costs. Before it starts, the models you chose and the rounds you asked for are priced, and that figure is taken up front. A cheap bench over three rounds and a frontier bench at high effort over twenty are orders of magnitude apart, and they are billed that way. Sharpening a topic and screening a motion stay flat — a tenth and a twentieth of a unit — because the variance in them is not worth the arithmetic.
• The figure taken up front is a ceiling, and you get the difference back. It assumes every turn runs to its full length and spends its whole reasoning budget, which most do not. When a leg ends, what it actually cost is read off the provider's own accounting and the balance of the reservation is returned to you as a credit on your account. A debate that ran cheap costs you what it ran at.
• A debate that costs more than its ceiling is not billed the difference. Where the estimate came in low that is our error, and charging you for a number you were never shown is not a ceiling.
• The balance is never overdrawn. If it will not carry the charge you are refused rather than billed, and if the ledger cannot be reached at all you are refused then too — the same way the budget check in clause 07 fails.

A spend is financial history and is kept independently of the debate it paid for, on purpose: deleting a debate does not erase the record that it was charged for.

Clause 10

Saved debates and unlisted links

Saving a debate stores an immutable snapshot — the motion, the agreed ground, the whole transcript, the ruling and which model argued which side — and hands back a link with a random sixteen-character identifier in it.

Unpublishing, and how you can lose the ability to

Because there are no accounts, ownership of a saved debate is possession of a delete token. It is shown to you exactly once, at the moment you save; only a hash of it is stored, so reading our database does not reveal it, and neither we nor anyone else can recover or reissue it. Your browser keeps it for you in local storage, for up to fifty debates.

Clear that browser’s storage, save from a different device, or use a private window, and the token is gone — and with it your ability to unpublish. The link goes on working.

How long a saved debate lasts

Not indefinitely, and not for a stated period. The archive holds a bounded number of debates — five hundred as the code stands — and each new save drops the oldest record beyond that bound. A link you saved can therefore stop working simply because other people saved after you. We do not promise to keep any saved debate for any length of time, and we may delete any record at any time.

To ask for a saved debate to be taken down, write to [email protected].

Clause 11

Availability

There is no uptime commitment. None is offered here and none exists elsewhere. The service is a small deployment and behaves like one:

• Releases go out one machine at a time, so the site stays up across a deploy — but the machine being replaced drops the debates it is streaming. The transcript survives: the chamber reconnects and picks the argument up from the last turn written down, and the turn that was mid-sentence is spoken again from the start. Expect a few seconds’ interruption and a repeated turn.
• Only a bounded number of debates are held in progress at once — thirty-two as the code stands — and the oldest are dropped when that fills. A debate that has been dropped cannot be continued; it answers “that debate is no longer in progress.”
• A debate can only be advanced from one place at a time. Asking twice at once answers “that debate is being continued elsewhere.”
• Everything downstream — model providers, the routing service, the moderation classifier, the identity provider, the host — can fail independently of us, and several of the checks above turn such a failure into a refusal rather than a risk.

We may change, suspend or withdraw any part of the service, including the model roster, the caps and the free tier, at any time and without notice.

Clause 12

Ownership

What you write

Your motion, your stipulations and your floor points stay yours, and you confirm you have the right to submit them. You give us permission to send them to the model providers in order to run the debate you asked for, and — if you choose to save — to store them and serve them at the resulting link until the record is deleted or drops out of the archive.

What the models write

The debate text and the ruling are generated by third-party models through OpenRouter. We claim no ownership of that text, and we are not in a position to grant you any: whether machine-generated text is anyone’s property at all is unsettled, and what you may do with it is also governed by the terms of the provider whose model produced it. We cannot and do not give you exclusivity over it. The same motion, put twice, is two debates.

You can export a debate as a Markdown document to take elsewhere. The export deliberately opens by naming the format and saying the benches were assigned rather than chosen, so that whatever reads it next is not misled about what it is reading. Please leave that framing on it.

What is ours

The Splitbench name, the mark, the site and the software behind it are ours and are not open source. Nothing here grants you a licence to copy, host or resell them.

Clause 13

Warranties

The service is provided as it is. We do not warrant that it will be available, that a debate will finish, that a saved link will keep working, that a motion will be accepted, or that anything a model writes is accurate, complete, original or fit for any purpose. See clause 03: producing persuasive text for a position nobody verified is what the product does.

Clause 14

Changes, law, and getting hold of us

We expect to change these terms as the service changes — the paid tier in clause 09 does not exist yet, and building it will move several clauses here.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Florida, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules, and the state and federal courts sitting in Florida are where a dispute about them is decided.

Questions, complaints, and requests to take a saved debate down go to [email protected].