Scroll sideways to see all five labs. Use the arrow keys when the grid is focused.
“Meets” needs a written policy or the contract wording. One public statement, such as an interview comment or a statement reported in the press, earns “Partly” at most. “Falls short” can rest on credible reporting, such as a news report quoting staff. When it does, the evidence says so and includes the lab’s response.
Public evidence only
Can people who work at AI labs tell the public when something's wrong? Lab Canary checks what's publicly known about lab contracts and speak-up policies against a simple standard: protect real secrets, never gag criticism or whistleblowing.
Click a tile to see the evidence. Click a lab's name for its summary.
The standard
Seven principles a lab's staff contracts should meet. They're the yardstick for this scorecard, not contract wording or legal advice. Employment law differs between countries, so anyone drafting or signing a contract should get their own lawyer.
The evidence
| Lab | Clause | Rating | Evidence | Sources and dates |
|---|
How opting in works
1. Publish your terms
A lab shares its standard employment, exit and equity terms (redacted is fine) plus its speak-up policy.
2. Get scored
Each clause gets a rating, with the exact wording that earned it.
3. Shown here
Opted-in labs are marked. Everyone else stays rated on public evidence only.
Questions
“How is this different from AI Lab Watch, the FLI AI Safety Index or AIWI?”
Those mostly look at policies and safety practice. This looks at what’s publicly known about the contracts: non-disparagement, equity, NDAs and confidentiality. AIWI’s Publish Your Policies campaign is the closest, and I cite it a lot.
“Anthropic and OpenAI are top. Are you tied to them?”
Fair question. I’ve applied for jobs and fellowships at Anthropic, OpenAI and Google DeepMind, and I say so in the note at the bottom of this page. Nobody pays for it, and I don’t own shares in any AI lab. Both are only on 43%, and almost every rating is “Partly”. They’re top because they’ve published more, not because their terms are known to be good.
“Not public = fail is unfair.”
I went back and forth on it. Treating it as neutral rewards publishing nothing. It’s a score for openness, not a finding that the terms are bad, and the labs control what’s published, so they can fix it. The site shows “Not public” separately so you can see the gap.
“Why these seven clauses?”
They’re the bits of a contract that decide whether someone can speak up: what they can say, what they lose if they do, and who they can tell. Happy to hear if one’s unfair or something’s missing.
“How can you rate contracts you haven’t seen?”
Mostly I can’t, and the site says so. 18 of 35 are “Not public”. The rest come from published policies, public statements and reporting, each linked.
“Why do Anthropic and OpenAI have the same score?”
Equal weights. They get to 43% differently, and the site breaks it down.
“US law already bans some of this.”
Some of it, in some places, for some disclosures. A clause can be unenforceable and still stop people talking, because most people won’t test it. Saying it plainly in the contract is the point of C3.
“What’s the site made of, and where does it run?”
One HTML page and two data files, ratings.json and criteria.json. There’s no server, database or login. It’s hosted on Cloudflare Pages and the domain is registered with Cloudflare. All the code and every rating are public on GitHub under the MIT licence, with a history of every change. I built it with help from Claude.
“Who pays for it?”
Nobody. I pay for the domain, about $10 a year, and the hosting is free. There are no ads.
“What do you track?”
I want to see how people use the page so I can make it better. Cloudflare Web Analytics and PostHog (hosted in the EU) count visits, and PostHog also records sessions on this page: clicks, scrolling and mouse movement. Neither sets cookies, PostHog doesn’t keep IP addresses, and nothing you type is recorded. Recordings are deleted after 30 days. I don’t sell or share any of it.
“Can I send you my contract, or a tip?”
Please don’t. The point is to get labs to publish their terms, not to collect leaks. I only use public evidence, so I’d delete anything confidential without using it, and sending it to a website probably isn’t legally protected. Worried about your own terms? Protect gives free, confidential whistleblowing advice in the UK.
“How do I get in touch, or fix a mistake?”
There’s no contact email, on purpose. This is meant to be one place to see all the public evidence and push the labs to publish more. If something’s wrong or missing, open an issue on GitHub with a link to a public source, so everyone can see the change and why. Labs can do the same, or publish their terms and opt in.