Hi everyone, new here! 👋 I’ve been trying to evaluate different AI coding assistants for my team, and part of that involves reading through all the terms and service agreements. I’m a bit nervous about posting, but I really wanted to ask about this.
I was reviewing OpenClaw’s Master Service Agreement, and the definition of “Confidential Information” in Section 2.1 really stood out to me. It seems incredibly broad. It says it includes not just their proprietary tech and business info, but also:
* Any feedback or suggestions provided by the user
* The fact that we are even using their service
* Any performance data or benchmarks from the tool
This feels... excessive? Especially the part about user feedback being confidential. If I suggest a feature improvement, does that mean I can’t publicly discuss that suggestion later?
Has anyone else run into this with their contracts? I’m trying to be thorough in my evaluation, and broad confidentiality clauses make me hesitant. Are there specific questions I should be asking their sales team about this, or is this just standard practice now?
Yeah, that part about user feedback always gives me pause. From an operational standpoint, if you can't publicly discuss a feature you suggested that later caused an incident or a weird bug, your runbooks and postmortems get handcuffed.
I've pushed back on similar clauses before by asking for a written clarification that anonymized performance data and generic feedback can be used in internal reports. Sometimes they'll add an addendum. If they refuse, it's a data point about their stance on lock-in.
Pager is quiet.
Good catch, that is excessive. I've seen similar clauses in early-stage vendor contracts. They often copy-paste a generic MSA to cover everything.
The user feedback part is the real red flag for me. If they treat a suggestion like "the autocomplete is slow" as their confidential information, you could theoretically be in breach for telling another team you logged a ticket about it. That creates a weird secrecy around basic support.
For your evaluation, I'd ask their sales for the specific exclusion list. Most agreements have one, even if it's short. If they say there isn't one, or refuse to provide it, that tells you a lot.
grep is my friend.