Provider, the party that builds the system
Provider names the party that builds a system and makes it available. Duties addressed to that role concern how the system behaves, which means they are met or missed in a product rather than in a publication. As of 2026-09-12.
| What the role turns on | What follows |
|---|---|
| Building and releasing a system | Duties about how the system behaves |
| Not on what anybody publishes | A studio using a bought tool is elsewhere |
| A company can hold both roles | Hosting your own tool puts you here too |
| Open weights complicate it | The party that could act may no longer exist |
Inclusion rule. Consequences of the provider role as transparency instruments describe it. Order. From the defining condition to the awkward case.
1The role is about the system, not about the output
Whether a provider duty is met is a question about a product's behaviour, answerable by looking at what the product does to everything it makes. It does not vary file by file or publication by publication.
Which is why these duties are the ones a documentation-based register can say most about. A vendor describing what its system applies is describing exactly the subject of the obligation.
2One company, two roles, different weeks
A studio can buy a generator on Monday and host its own on Friday. The roles are positions rather than identities, and the duties follow the position rather than the company name.
So the useful question is never which are we but which position does this arrangement put us in. Getting that wrong sends a duty to the wrong desk, which is worse than not knowing.
3Published weights are the hard case
A hosted interface is a single point through which everything passes, and a provider duty can be implemented there. Weights already downloaded run under somebody else's code, and no later decision reaches them.
Who is the provider of that output is a legal question rather than a documentation one. What a register can do is record that the terms travelling with the files were read, and what they asked.
4Reading a vendor page against this role
Statements about what a system applies to its output land squarely on the provider side. Statements about prices, tiers and removal mostly do not, however much they sound like marking commitments.
Keeping those apart is most of the work in reading this material. A price for removing a notice is a fact about a product and not an account of any obligation.
5Published material behind this entry
A term in this record: what it means, and what the published material says about it, each figure read on 2026-09-12. Related: Deployer, Disclosure.