Three different things, kept separate.

The software

Governed by its licence, not by this page. If anything here conflicts with the licence as it applies to the software, the licence wins.

This website

Governed by section 3 below: read it, link to it, quote it with attribution.

The demo

Governed by section 4 below, which is short and mostly consists of one rule.

Your own install

Yours to operate. Section 5 says plainly what that means, because self-hosting moves real responsibility onto the person hosting.

There is no hosted service here, no subscription, and nothing to cancel. We do not have an account of yours to suspend.

The public licence is the Functional Source License 1.1 with an MIT future grant (FSL-1.1-MIT). You may use, copy, modify, self-host and redistribute Mantle for any purpose that is not a Competing Use, at no cost. Two years after a release is published, that release converts to the MIT licence outright.

A Competing Use means, broadly, offering Mantle — or something substantially derived from it — to third parties as a product or a service that substitutes for it. Running it for yourself, your family, your company, your clients’ internal use, or embedding it in your own internal systems is not competing, and needs no permission from us.

Embedding Mantle in a commercial product you sell, or operating it as a hosted service for others, needs the commercial licence. That is a conversation, not a rejection: licensing@crossworks.engineering.

The licence text itself

LICENSE.md in the repository

The commercial terms

LICENSE-COMMERCIAL.md

A plain-language explainer

LICENSING.md — written for the question “can I do this?” rather than for lawyers. It is guidance, and the licence text is what binds.

Trade marks are not covered by the licence. The name Mantle, the Mantle wordmark, and the Cross Works Engineering name and logo remain ours. A licence to the code is not a licence to the brand: a fork is welcome, and calling your fork Mantle is not.

You may read it, link to it freely, and quote from it with attribution. You may take screenshots for reviews, articles and internal write-ups.

Crawling and AI training are explicitly allowed. The robots file says so and we mean it. Indexing this site, retrieving from it, and training on it are all fine — it is a memory product for AI, and being absent from the corpora would be a strange way to sell it. /llms.txt is the curated version if you want the short path.

You may not republish substantial parts of it as your own, present it as your product, or use our marks in a way that suggests we endorse or are affiliated with you.

We change this site whenever we like. Pages move, claims get sharpened, and figures get re-measured. Nothing here is an offer, a warranty or a contractual commitment about how the software will behave in your environment.

Do not enter real, personal or confidential information into the demo.

It is shared and public

One environment, seeded with fictional data, open to everyone. Assume anything in it is visible to anyone.

No uptime, no support, no persistence

It may be reset, changed or withdrawn at any time without notice. Nothing in it is backed up and nothing in it is recoverable.

Use it as intended

No load testing, no bulk automated scraping, no attempts to reach the host or anything else on it, no using it as free compute or as a general-purpose assistant. Ordinary security research on your own install is welcome; probing ours without written permission is not.

We can cut off access

To anyone, at any time, for any reason, without notice and without explanation. There is no account, so there is nothing to appeal.

Model providers are your contract

You supply your own keys. Their terms, their acceptable-use rules and their bills apply directly to you. We are not a party to any of it and do not see your spend.

What it ingests is your call

You choose the mailboxes, drives and documents. You are responsible for having the right to ingest them, and for the obligations that follow from holding other people’s information.

Security of the install is yours

Your server, your TLS, your tokens, your backups. We have no access to your deployment and cannot recover, reset or revoke anything in it.

Autonomy means it acts without you

Routines fire on a clock and agents send mail and messages under the tool grants you give them. Grant deliberately, read the traces, and treat a broad grant as the decision it is.

Sharing is a decision, not a default

Team tokens and peer grants expose parts of your brain to other people and other brains. What you share is what they can read.

Mantle is built on large language models. It will occasionally produce output that is confidently, fluently incorrect. Citations make its claims checkable and traces make its steps reviewable — that is the design — but neither makes it right, and neither removes your judgement from the loop.

Its output is not professional advice of any kind: not legal, not medical, not financial, not tax. Do not put it in the path of a consequential decision without a human checking the result. If a mistake would be expensive or irreversible, verify before acting.

The software, this website and the demo are provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties or conditions of any kind, express or implied. To the maximum extent permitted by law we disclaim the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, and non-infringement.

We do not warrant that the software is free of defects, that it will meet your requirements, that it will run uninterrupted, or that its output will be accurate or complete. You are welcome to inspect the source before relying on it — that option is a large part of what the licence is for.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, Cross Works Engineering (Pty) Ltd is not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost revenue, lost data, or business interruption, arising out of or connected with the software, this website or the demo, whether in contract, delict, tort or otherwise, and whether or not we were advised such loss was possible.

Where liability cannot lawfully be excluded, our total aggregate liability is limited to the amount you have actually paid us in the twelve months preceding the claim — which, for anyone using the FSL licence, is nothing.

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or any right you have under South Africa’s Consumer Protection Act or comparable consumer legislation where it applies to you.

Governing law. These terms are governed by the laws of the Republic of South Africa, and the South African courts have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer elsewhere, this does not deprive you of the protection of mandatory law in your own country.

Changes. We may update these terms. The date at the top is the effective date, and continuing to use the site or the demo after a change means you accept the updated version. Changes are not retroactive and do not alter the licence attached to a release you already have.

Severability. If any provision is found unenforceable, the rest continues in force and the unenforceable part is read down to the narrowest change that makes it valid.

Privacy. How the site handles data is covered separately, at mantle-ai.tech/privacy.

Contact. Cross Works Engineering (Pty) Ltd — licensing@crossworks.engineering, for these terms and for licensing alike.