MBA Memory — Terms of Service

Draft prepared with AI assistance. This is not legal advice and has not been reviewed by counsel. Consult an attorney before relying on it. Last revised: 2026-05-13.

These Terms of Service ("Terms") govern your access to and use of MBA Memory (the "Service"), a closed-beta, invite-only AI study assistant for Columbia Business School ("CBS") MBA students, operated by Sanat Dhir ("we," "us," or "MBA Memory"). Contact: sdhir26@gsb.columbia.edu.

MBA Memory is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or otherwise officially connected to Columbia University, Columbia Business School, or any of their schools, departments, faculty, or staff. References to Columbia, CBS, courses, faculty, or coursework are descriptive only.

By creating an account or using the Service, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

1. Eligibility & access

The Service is invite-only and restricted to current and recent CBS students. To use the Service you must:

Have a valid columbia.edu email address (including subdomains such as gsb.columbia.edu). This is enforced at signup via a domain gate.
Sign up, be placed on a waitlist (pending_approval), and be manually approved by an administrator.
Accept these Terms and the Columbia Business School Honor Code as presented in-product.
Be at least 18 years old (or the age of majority in your jurisdiction) and have the legal capacity to enter into these Terms.

We may decline, delay, or revoke access at our discretion, including where we believe the eligibility criteria or these Terms are not met.

2. Your account & the Honor Code

You are responsible for:

Keeping your account credentials secure and for all activity under your account.
Providing accurate information (including your Columbia email and, when prompted, a Canvas personal access token used transiently to fetch your enrolled-course list — see the Privacy Policy).
Using the Service in a manner consistent with the CBS Honor Code, your course policies, and these Terms.

The Service is a personal study aid. It is not a substitute for attending class, reading assigned materials, completing your own coursework, or exercising your own academic judgment. Using outputs from the Service in ways that violate your school's academic-integrity rules is your responsibility, not ours.

3. The Service — what it does and does not do

MBA Memory ingests course-related materials (lecture slides, lecture transcripts, student notes, and similar items) into a private retrieval system and uses AI models to generate answers grounded in that content, with citations to the source where possible.

The Service provides text question-and-answer only. It does not generate voice, downloadable files, or artifacts beyond on-screen answers.

You acknowledge and agree that:

AI outputs can be wrong, incomplete, biased, or out of date. Always verify before relying on them — especially for exams, graded work, recruiting, or any decision that matters.
Citations may be imperfect. The Service attempts to attribute answers to source materials but may misattribute, hallucinate, or miss context. Verify against the original source.
No professional advice. Nothing the Service produces is legal, medical, financial, tax, investment, accounting, or other professional advice.

4. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

Use the Service for anyone other than yourself (no account sharing; no proxying queries on behalf of non-enrolled users).
Redistribute, repost, publish, sell, or share outputs from the Service in ways that would substitute for the underlying course materials, the textbooks, the readings, or the professors' work.
Upload, ingest, or attempt to ingest content you do not have the right to upload (see Section 5).
Attempt to scrape, mirror, train other AI systems on, or otherwise bulk-export the corpus, the prompts, or the outputs.
Attempt to circumvent the columbia.edu email gate, the approval process, the abuse-monitoring systems, course-access controls, or any other security feature.
Reverse engineer, decompile, or attempt to derive the source code, models, or underlying retrieval logic of the Service.
Use the Service to harass, defame, or violate the rights of others, or to generate unlawful content.
Use the Service in violation of the CBS Honor Code, applicable course policies, applicable law, or any third-party rights (including copyright and confidentiality obligations).
Use the Service to generate or submit work that is presented as your own in a context that prohibits AI assistance.

We may monitor use (automatically and through manual review) and may suspend or terminate accounts for suspected abuse.

5. Content you upload — your representations and warranties

To the extent you upload, submit, share, or otherwise make available any content to the Service — including personal notes, files, prompts, or any other material ("Your Content") — you represent and warrant that:

You have the right to upload Your Content and to grant the limited license below.
Your Content does not violate any third party's copyright, license terms, confidentiality obligations (including any role-play or counterparty-confidential teaching materials), publisher terms (e.g., Harvard Business Publishing / HBR, casebook publishers, licensed datasets), trade secret, or other rights.
Your Content does not violate the CBS Honor Code, course policies, or any agreement you have with Columbia, CBS, or any third party.
You assume responsibility for any consequences of uploading content you did not have the right to upload, and you agree to indemnify and hold us harmless from third-party claims arising from your uploads (see Section 11).

Limited license to us. Solely so we can operate the Service for you, you grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to host, store, copy, chunk, embed, index, retrieve, transmit, and process Your Content for the purpose of providing the Service to you (including making it searchable for you and generating answers for you). We do not claim ownership of Your Content. We do not use Your Content to train AI models. See the Privacy Policy for details.

Removal. We may remove or quarantine any content (uploaded by you or already in the corpus) that we believe — at our discretion — may infringe third-party rights, violate these Terms, breach confidentiality, or expose us or the school to legal risk. See the DMCA & Takedown Policy and the Corpus Provenance design doc for the operational approach.

6. AI outputs — ownership, use, and disclaimers

Subject to your compliance with these Terms, you may use the AI-generated answers the Service returns to you for your personal study. You may not redistribute, publish, or otherwise share them in ways that substitute for the underlying course materials or that violate the CBS Honor Code, course policies, or these Terms.

AI outputs may overlap with outputs returned to other users for similar queries. We make no representation that any given output is unique to you, original, accurate, complete, current, or free of errors.

7. Credits, billing, and payments

The Service uses a credit-based model. Eligible new users may receive a one-time welcome credit on first approval, sufficient for an introductory amount of usage. Pricing is per-school and private; we do not publish dollar amounts. The current price per query and your remaining credit balance are visible inside the application.

You agree that:

Credits are non-refundable except where required by law or expressly stated by us.
Credits have no cash value, are personal to your account, and may not be transferred or resold.
We may change pricing, credit policies, and the way credits are consumed by giving notice (in-product or by email). Changes apply prospectively to new credit purchases and queries after the effective date.
We may suspend access if your balance is depleted and you do not top up.
Promotional credits (including any credit granted to demo, professor, evaluation, or beta accounts) may have additional terms, expiry dates, or scope restrictions communicated when they are granted (for example, professor-demo accounts include time-limited access and a custom disclaimer).

8. Third-party services & subprocessors

The Service depends on third-party providers (including for AI inference, embeddings, hosting, authentication, email, and error monitoring). These providers are listed in the Privacy Policy. By using the Service you consent to your interactions being processed by these subprocessors under their then-current terms, in addition to ours.

9. Intellectual property — non-affiliation

"MBA Memory" and the look and feel of the Service are ours (or our licensors'). All other marks — including "Columbia," "Columbia Business School," "CBS," course names, professor names, and Canvas — are the property of their respective owners and are used here in a descriptive, nominative-fair-use manner. No endorsement, sponsorship, partnership, or affiliation is implied. See the non-affiliation disclaimer at the top of these Terms.

10. DMCA and takedown

We respect the intellectual-property rights of others. If you believe content available through the Service infringes your copyright, please follow our DMCA & Takedown Policy. We will respond consistently with the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 512, and we maintain a repeat-infringer policy as described there.

11. Disclaimers

THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE," WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, WHETHER EXPRESS, IMPLIED, OR STATUTORY, INCLUDING IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, ACCURACY, AND QUIET ENJOYMENT.

WITHOUT LIMITING THE FOREGOING, WE MAKE NO WARRANTY THAT:

THE SERVICE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, SECURE, OR ERROR-FREE.
AI OUTPUTS WILL BE ACCURATE, COMPLETE, CURRENT, OR FREE OF HALLUCINATIONS.
CITATIONS OR SOURCE ATTRIBUTIONS WILL BE CORRECT.
THE SERVICE WILL MEET YOUR ACADEMIC, PROFESSIONAL, OR PERSONAL OBJECTIVES.

You use the Service at your own risk and are solely responsible for any decisions made or actions taken based on its outputs.

12. Limitation of liability

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW:

WE WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR LOST PROFITS, REVENUES, GOODWILL, DATA, OPPORTUNITIES, OR ACADEMIC OUTCOMES, ARISING OUT OF OR RELATED TO THE SERVICE, THESE TERMS, OR YOUR USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE SERVICE — EVEN IF WE HAVE BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
OUR TOTAL AGGREGATE LIABILITY ARISING OUT OF OR RELATED TO THE SERVICE OR THESE TERMS IS LIMITED TO THE GREATER OF (a) THE AMOUNTS YOU HAVE PAID US (excluding free or welcome credits) IN THE TWELVE (12) MONTHS PRECEDING THE EVENT GIVING RISE TO THE CLAIM, OR (b) ONE HUNDRED U.S. DOLLARS ($100).

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion or limitation of certain damages; in such jurisdictions our liability is limited to the maximum extent permitted by law.

13. Indemnification

You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless MBA Memory, its operator, and its personnel from and against any claims, damages, liabilities, costs, and expenses (including reasonable attorneys' fees) arising out of or related to:

Your use of, or inability to use, the Service.
Your breach of these Terms (including your representations and warranties in Section 5).
Your violation of any third-party right, including any intellectual-property or confidentiality right.
Your violation of any applicable law, course policy, or the CBS Honor Code.

14. Termination

You may stop using the Service at any time. We may suspend or terminate your access — with or without notice — if we reasonably believe you have violated these Terms, the CBS Honor Code, applicable law, or third-party rights; if your eligibility lapses (e.g., you no longer have a columbia.edu address); for repeat-infringement; for non-payment; for safety, security, or legal reasons; or because we decide to wind down or change the Service.

Upon termination, Sections 5 (last paragraph), 6, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17 survive.

15. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. When we do, we will revise the "Last revised" date at the bottom and, for material changes, give reasonable advance notice in-product or by email. Your continued use of the Service after the effective date of revised Terms constitutes acceptance of those Terms. If you do not agree, stop using the Service.

16. Governing law and dispute resolution

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of New York, U.S.A., without regard to its conflict-of-laws principles. The parties consent to the exclusive jurisdiction of the state and federal courts located in New York County, New York, for any dispute that is not subject to arbitration or other alternative dispute resolution.

17. Miscellaneous

Entire agreement. These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy and the DMCA & Takedown Policy, are the entire agreement between you and us regarding the Service.
Severability. If any provision is held unenforceable, the remaining provisions remain in effect.
No waiver. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of our right to enforce it later.
Assignment. You may not assign these Terms; we may assign them in connection with a merger, acquisition, financing, or sale of assets.
No third-party beneficiaries, except as expressly stated.
Headings are for convenience only.
Contact. Questions or notices: sdhir26@gsb.columbia.edu.

Last revised: 2026-05-13.