Legal

CATO is a data analysis platform designed for biomedical researchers. It provides AI-assisted data exploration, statistical analysis, code execution, and literature review capabilities. By using CATO, you agree to the rules in this policy.

These rules are not a substitute for the law, for your professional and ethical duties, or for the approvals your work needs. Ethics or IRB approval, participant consent, data-use agreements, biosafety and export rules, and your institution's policies all still apply to what you do with CATO, and complying with them is your responsibility.

CATO is intended for:

• Exploratory data analysis and statistical modeling
• Generating and executing analysis code in sandboxed environments
• Biomedical literature search and review, including multi-source academic search, AI-powered evidence extraction, citation network analysis, and document generation
• Organizing and managing research datasets
• Full-text analysis of open-access research papers
• Use of expanded bioinformatics tools and analysis libraries available in the sandbox

When using Literature Intelligence, your search queries are transmitted to external academic databases and APIs. You should not include personally identifiable information or PHI in literature search queries.

If your data originates from health records, you are responsible for ensuring it has been properly de-identified in accordance with HIPAA Safe Harbor (removal of all 18 identifier categories) or Expert Determination (a person with appropriate expertise has determined that the re-identification risk is very small) before uploading it to CATO.

You must also refrain from entering PHI into chat conversations, including patient names, identifiers, or any information that could be linked to a specific individual.

Organizations that need to process PHI must enter into an enterprise agreement with Nyrus. A Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with Nyrus, together with the corresponding agreements with the third-party service providers that would handle the data, may be available as part of such an agreement. Contact us to discuss enterprise agreements and deployment options.

You may not use CATO to:

• Process PHI without an enterprise BAA in place
• Process other identifiable consumer health, genetic, biometric, or patient-level data through a standard account
• Attempt to re-identify de-identified datasets
• Circumvent security controls or sandbox restrictions
• Generate malicious code or conduct unauthorized access
• Violate any applicable laws or regulations
• Systematically download or redistribute full-text research papers beyond fair use
• Circumvent publisher access controls or paywalls through CATO's literature tools
• Deceive or defraud anyone, impersonate a person or organization, run scams or spam, or present AI-generated output as the independent work of a person

You may not use CATO to:

• Threaten, harass, intimidate, or defame anyone
• Promote or facilitate suicide, self-harm, or disordered eating
• Promote or facilitate violence, terrorism, or sexual violence
• Plan or carry out illegal activity, or obtain illicit goods or services
• Develop malware, or compromise, damage, or gain unauthorized access to any system or data that is not yours

CATO analyzes sequences, structures, and biomedical data, so it could in principle be misused. You may not use CATO to design, develop, produce, acquire, or enhance biological, chemical, radiological, or nuclear weapons or their means of delivery, or to assist anyone else in doing so. In particular, you may not use CATO to:

• Increase the transmissibility, virulence, host range, environmental stability, or immune or treatment evasion of a pathogen
• Design, synthesize, or obtain toxins, select agents, or regulated pathogens, or plan routes to acquire them
• Evade biosecurity screening, sequence screening, biosafety containment, or export controls
• Conduct dual-use research of concern without the institutional biosafety and oversight approvals that research requires

We may refuse, limit, or review requests that touch these areas, and we may report credible threats to the authorities.

You may not use CATO to:

• Fabricate, falsify, or simulate data, results, images, figures, or citations and present them as real
• Present AI-generated analysis as independently verified, or omit the checks that a claim needs before it is published
• Evade ethics or IRB approval, participant consent, a data-use agreement, or the access terms of a data repository such as dbGaP or EGA
• Plagiarize, or produce work for paper mills or for others to submit as their own

A human author takes responsibility for every result produced with CATO. Follow the disclosure rules of the journals, institutions, and funders you submit work to.

Each project's sandbox can run code and reach an approved list of public destinations over HTTPS. It exists to analyze your data. You may not use it to:

• Mine cryptocurrency or run workloads unrelated to your research
• Host servers, proxies, tunnels, relays, or bots, or serve content to third parties
• Scan, probe, flood, or attack any network or system, or send spam or bulk email
• Scrape or download data in breach of a site's terms, or evade the sandbox's network and resource limits
• Store or process credentials, secrets, or data you are not authorized to hold

CATO accounts are for adults. Whatever your age, you may never use CATO to exploit, endanger, or sexualize anyone under 18, or to groom or expose a minor to harm. You may never use CATO to produce or describe child sexual abuse material, whether or not any part of it is AI-generated. We report apparent child sexual abuse material and child endangerment to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and to the relevant authorities.

You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your account credentials. Do not share your login with others. Automated or programmatic abuse of the platform is prohibited.

Nyrus reserves the right to suspend or terminate accounts that violate this policy. We will make reasonable efforts to notify you before taking action, except in cases of egregious or urgent violations.