Trust & Safety

1. Identity

Verification

Before any sona can be published, the creator completes Stripe Identity verification: a government-issued ID document combined with a live selfie. The check confirms three things at once. That the document is genuine. That it belongs to you. That the identity it confirms matches the individual the sona represents.

Locked at publication

Once a sona is published, its identity is locked. The name cannot be changed afterwards. This prevents an account from being set up under one name, verified, and then renamed to impersonate someone else.

Pen names

Some creators are known publicly under a pen name rather than their legal name. We support this through a manual verification path. Contact team@sonaverse.ai with your request. Our team will verify the pen name against an authenticatable or verifiable record before allowing it to be used as your sona's display name. This route is referenced in-app during the standard ID verification step.

Living people only

Sonaverse is for living people, creating sonas of themselves. Sonas of deceased people, fictional characters, or assumed personas are not permitted.

If a creator dies

A sona may only be created of a living individual, but what happens after death matters too. We've thought it through.

On notification of a creator's death, the sona is suspended immediately. From there, two paths:

Provisions cannot be made after death. If you want your sona to remain available after you die, contact us at support@sonaverse.ai to record your wishes while you are alive.

No impersonation

There is no path through Sonaverse to publishing a sona of someone other than yourself. Verification is the gate. The locked name is the lock. The tier system (see Section 4) gives creators further control over what's available and to whom.

2. Fidelity

Grounded in your material

Your sona is grounded in two sources: the four 15-minute interviews you complete with Sunny, our AI interviewer, and the Knowledge Materials you choose to connect (books, podcasts, articles, talks, posts, papers). It draws on what you have actually said and written. It does not generate opinions on your behalf.

Technical safeguards against wholesale reproduction

Our retrieval system applies automatic limits to protect against your sona becoming a substitute for the source materials behind it. No single passage surfaced from a Knowledge Material exceeds 500 words. The total content surfaced from any single source within a single conversation session is capped at 1,000 words. This is a technical safeguard, not a substitute for the rights checks you make before uploading.

When the sona doesn't know

If a member asks your sona about something outside your interviews and connected material, the sona is designed to acknowledge the gap rather than fabricate an answer. We tune the model toward honesty about its limits, not toward apparent confidence.

This isn't perfect. Language models can drift. We monitor for drift, and we make it easy for you to refine your sona if you notice it.

Beta Phase: preview before public launch

Before your sona goes live to the public, you go through a Beta Phase. You can invite up to 10 people to converse with your sona, gather their feedback, and refine the underlying material before publication. The Beta Phase is always free (you cannot charge subscribers during Beta), has no minimum duration, and is the standard route to public launch.

Refining and updating

Once published, you can keep adding material. New interviews, new work, new posts. Your sona updates as you do.

Unpublishing

You can unpublish your sona at any time, for any reason. There is no minimum commitment, no notice period, and no charge to do so.

Voice

3. Privacy and data

What we store

We store: your interview audio and transcripts; the Knowledge Materials you connect (source documents, extracted text, and vector embeddings); the sona model built from these; and member conversations for members who subscribe to your sona. Conversation storage is what allows continuity across sessions.

What we don't do with it

Your material is used only to build and run your sona. We will not use your Personal Materials or Knowledge Materials to train AI models for purposes beyond the specific sona associated with your Content, without your separate express consent. We do not share it with other creators. We do not sell it.

Training opt-out

You can opt out of our use of your Content to improve our Services beyond your specific sona at any time. Navigate to Data Use settings in your account, or contact us at privacy@sonaverse.ai. Once processed, your Content stops being used for that purpose, except as needed to keep providing the Services to you.

Security and access

All data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Our database is SOC 2 compliant. Creator material and member conversations are stored with row-level access controls; access is scoped to what is required to provide the Service.

Deletion and retention

You can delete your sona at any time. When you do, source documents and extracted text are deleted promptly. Vector embeddings are purged from our operational systems within 30 days. The sona model itself is deactivated, and we take all reasonable steps to remove accessible copies as promptly as technically feasible. (Some components of trained models may have technical limitations on retroactive removal; we deactivate first, and remove as fully as we can.)

Member conversations associated with the deleted sona are also deleted.

Member conversations

When a member subscribes to a sona, their conversations are stored. This enables the sona to remember previous exchanges and maintain continuity. Members can view and delete their own conversation history at any time.

What creators see about members

Creators do not see the content of member conversations. They see aggregate signals: subscriber count, broad topic patterns, conversation volume. They do not see who asked what, or the words of any individual exchange.

4. Access and control

Tiers of depth

Not all access to a sona is the same. The tier system gives creators control over what is available at each level, and gives members a choice of how deep to go.

A few things to know about how this works:

This is one of the more important trust features for creators with sensitive material. You do not have to publish everything publicly, and you do not have to keep everything private. You decide the layers.

Ownership

You own your sona. You decide what material it draws on, what topics it engages with, and who can access it at each tier.

As between you and Sonaverse, you retain the rights you hold in your Personal Materials, your Knowledge Materials, and the Outputs generated for you. The underlying AI infrastructure, sona model architecture, and platform itself remain Sonaverse's intellectual property. Full detail of the licence you grant us and what we are permitted to do with your Content is in our Terms of Service.

Non-transferable

Your creator account, your sona, and your subscriber base are personal to you. They cannot be sold, assigned, or transferred to anyone else. This protects against accounts being passed to or appropriated by people who have not been through the same verification process.

Your subscribers

The relationship between you and your subscribers is direct. You set the terms. You are the merchant of record. We facilitate the conversation; we do not insert ourselves between you and them.

5. For members

If you are a member talking to a sona, here is what you can rely on.

What a sona is

Every sona on Sonaverse is an AI grounded in the words and work of a real, ID-verified person. The name on the sona is the name on the creator's verified ID. There is no impersonation, no anonymous sonas, no impostors.

What a sona isn't

A sona is not the person themselves. It is an AI representation, designed to converse in their voice and draw on their reasoning. It can be wrong. It can run into the edge of what its creator has shared. When it does, it is designed to say so.

A sona's responses are not professional advice. Do not rely on them for medical, legal, financial, or other professional purposes without independent verification.

Your tier

Anyone can talk with a sona at Discovery for free, no signup required. If you want to go deeper, you can subscribe to Perspective or Wisdom (the creator sets the price for each). Legacy is not subscribable: it can only be gifted to you by the creator.

Your privacy

Your conversations with a sona are yours. The creator does not see them. We do not share them, sell them, or use them to train other models. You can delete your conversation history at any time.

6. Reporting concerns

If you have a concern, the right contact depends on what it is about.

We take all reports seriously. We act on them in line with our Terms of Service, our Prohibited Use Policy, and applicable law.

7. The legal framework

This document is the plainspoken summary. The legally binding detail is set out in:

Where this document and the legal documents differ, the legal documents take precedence.

Related offerings

Sonaverse also operates a separately-branded service called Neural Heirloom, which uses the same underlying architecture and legal infrastructure. Neural Heirloom engagements are governed by their own service agreement and are not covered by this document or by the Creator Marketplace terms.

This is a living document. As Sonaverse evolves, the practices behind these promises will too. When we make material changes, we will notify creators and members through the platform.