Policies

Adopted by the founding members on 19 October 2026. These policies apply to all OVAIC activities. Ez a dokumentum angolul és további öt nyelven érhető el. Az angol szöveg az irányadó. English

1. OVAIC Antitrust and Competition Policy
2. OVAIC Intellectual Property Policy
3. OVAIC Name and Results Policy
4. OVAIC Disclaimer

OVAIC Antitrust and Competition Policy

1. Why this policy exists

OVAIC brings together organisations that may compete with each other. Cooperation on open test cases, methods and reports is lawful and useful. Coordination of competitive behaviour is not. OVAIC and its members comply with the Swiss Cartel Act, Article 101 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union and every other competition law that applies to them.

2. Never discussed at OVAIC

In meetings, working groups, mailing lists, chats and side conversations, participants do not discuss or agree on:

1. prices, discounts, fees, margins, costs or terms of sale of their own products or services;
2. customers, suppliers, markets or territories, including who serves whom;
3. bids, tenders or decisions to bid;
4. production, capacity or output;
5. salaries, hiring or non solicitation of staff;
6. boycotts of, or refusals to deal with, any company, product or technology;
7. non public business plans, product roadmaps or other competitively sensitive information.

3. How OVAIC works

1. Open participation. Any organisation that meets the published criteria may join on the same terms.
2. Open results. Test cases, methods and reports are published. Nobody is excluded from using them.
3. Voluntary use. No member is obliged to use any method, profile or result, and no member may be pressured to do so.
4. No exclusion of technologies. OVAIC compares approaches; it does not decide which products succeed (Principle 4, Plurality).
5. Agendas and minutes. Every meeting has a written agenda sent in advance and minutes that record decisions.

4. Statement read at the start of every meeting

"This meeting is held under the OVAIC Antitrust and Competition Policy. We do not discuss prices, customers, markets, bids, salaries or other competitively sensitive information. If a discussion moves there, any participant may stop it, and it will be recorded in the minutes."

5. When in doubt

Stop the discussion, ask that the objection be minuted and contact the Steering Group or OVAIC's counsel. Participants remain responsible for consulting their own legal advisers.

6. Breaches

A breach may lead to exclusion from a meeting, suspension or termination of membership under the statutes.

OVAIC Intellectual Property Policy

1. Principle

Everything OVAIC publishes is open and free to use, by members and non members alike.

2. Licences for contributions

• Code, test harnesses, tools: Apache License 2.0.
• Texts, reports, profiles, specifications: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0).
• Test cases and data sets: CC BY 4.0, unless the source requires another open licence, which must be stated.

By contributing, a participant confirms that it has the right to do so and grants these licences.

3. Patents

1. Members commit to license, free of royalties and on reasonable, non discriminatory terms, any patent claim essential to implement an OVAIC profile or test harness. This follows the model of the W3C Patent Policy.
2. A member may exclude a specific patent claim by written notice within 60 days after a draft profile is published. Exclusions are published.
3. OVAIC does not own patents and does not seek them.

4. What stays with members

Members keep full ownership of their own products, methods and brands. Running a method on the OVAIC test bed transfers no rights in that method.

5. Third party material

Material from third parties is used only under its licence and is marked with its source.

6. Confidentiality

OVAIC works in the open. Participants must not share confidential information in OVAIC activities. Anything shared is treated as non confidential.

OVAIC Name and Results Policy

1. The name

"OVAIC" and "Open Verifiable AI Consortium" identify the consortium. They may be used to refer to it truthfully. They may not be used in a way that suggests endorsement, approval or certification.

2. Allowed

• "Member of OVAIC" or "Observer at OVAIC", while the membership is active.
• "Tested on the OVAIC test bed, suite [name] version [x], result published at [link]", when the result was produced under the published rules for that suite and is publicly available.
• Quoting OVAIC reports with attribution under CC BY 4.0.

3. Not allowed

• "OVAIC certified", "OVAIC approved", "OVAIC compliant", "trusted by OVAIC" or similar wording.
• Quoting a result without the suite version and a link to the published result.
• Comparing results produced under different suite versions or rules as if they were comparable.
• Using the name after membership has ended, except to describe the past truthfully.

4. Results

1. A result counts only if others can reproduce it from the published code and data (Principle 2).
2. Every result is published with the suite version, the date, the method version tested and the reproduction instructions.
3. Corrections are published in public with credit to whoever found the error (Principle 3). A corrected result replaces the old one; the old one stays visible in the history.

5. Enforcement

The Steering Group decides whether a use is acceptable and may ask for it to be corrected or withdrawn. Repeated misuse may lead to termination of membership.

OVAIC Disclaimer

OVAIC publishes methods, test cases and test results. It does not certify, endorse or rate any product, system, organisation or person, and no publication by OVAIC is a statement that anything can be trusted.

All material is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy or completeness. Results describe the behaviour of a specific version of a method on a specific version of a test suite at a specific time. They may not hold for other versions, settings or uses.

Nothing published by OVAIC is legal, financial, regulatory or investment advice. Readers remain responsible for their own decisions and for checking the published sources.

Views of individual members are their own and not those of OVAIC. Membership of OVAIC does not imply that OVAIC has reviewed or approved a member's products.

To the extent permitted by Swiss law, OVAIC and its members are not liable for damages arising from the use of its publications.