Governance

The founding charter

Curos was incorporated as a non-profit with a charter that fixes several things our successors cannot quietly change. The charter has five articles:

• Purpose. To build and operate AI systems that serve the public interest, and to make powerful AI broadly and freely accessible.
• Non-distribution. No profits may ever be distributed to founders, staff, or shareholders. There are no shareholders.
• Free access. Ichnus must remain free for individual use, and access may not be conditioned on data, behavior, or payment of any kind.
• Openness. The organization must publish what it can about how its models are built, tested, and governed — and must explain clearly what it cannot publish and why.
• Independent oversight. A majority of the board must be independent of the organization, and no single funder may ever hold more than one seat or any veto.

Amending the charter requires a supermajority of the board plus ratification by the community council. So far, we have never tried.

The board of directors

The board sets the strategic direction and is the final check on the executive team. A majority of seats are held by independent directors. One seat is elected by the community each year.

Oversight committees

Day-to-day accountability happens in the committees that sit between the board and the teams. Each committee publishes regular reports, and their members include outsiders who have no reason to be loyal to us.

Safety & Evaluations Committee

Chaired by Priya Raman, with the Head of Evaluations and an external advisor in AI safety. Reviews every model release, the evaluation suite it passed, and any incidents since the last review. The committee can delay a release. It can only be overruled by the full board.

Model Governance Committee

Reviews what each model is and is not allowed to do, and how those decisions are communicated to users. Includes an academic member, a user-council representative, and a rotating seat for the community. Its records are published.

Finance & Audit Committee

An independent subcommittee of the board that reviews the annual statements, approves the audit, and keeps an eye on spending. It is how "trust us, we're non-profit" becomes a set of audited numbers.

Community Council

An elected body of Ichnus users who advise on product behavior, review the transparency reports, and elect the community board seat. Anyone who has used Ichnus in the past year may stand for election.

How we stay honest

Structure only works if people use it. Three habits make the structure real: minutes of board and committee meetings are published in redacted form; the transparency page reports money in and money out every year; and every model release comes with a public evaluation report that the Safety Committee signs off on.

None of this is a guarantee. Governance is a practice, not a seal. But it is the practice we have committed to, and the structure makes it harder to quietly abandon.