SPAR Privacy Policy

Who we are

SPAR (the Supervised Program for Alignment Research) is a research mentorship program run by Kairos AI Project, Inc. ("Kairos", "we", "us"), a Delaware nonprofit corporation recognized as a 501(c)(3) public charity. Our registered address is 131 Continental Dr., Suite 305, Newark, Delaware 19713, United States. For anything in this policy, email us at spar@kairos-project.org.

This policy covers the SPAR websites (sparai.org, forms.sparai.org, and dash.sparai.org), SPAR applications, and the information we handle while running the program. It applies only to SPAR.

The short version

• We collect what you give us when you apply and participate, plus basic usage data on our sites.
• We use AI tools to help review applications, including an AI evaluation shown to mentors and an AI-writing detector. People make every decision. No score triggers any automatic acceptance or rejection.
• We share data with the vendors that run our infrastructure, with the mentors reviewing your application, and, only if you opt in, with specific programs we name at the point of consent.
• If you become a mentor, your profile and project become public on this site. If you complete the program, you get a public certificate page.
• We do not sell personal information and we do not use it for advertising.
• You can ask us to access, correct, or delete your information at spar@kairos-project.org, wherever you live.

Information we collect

When you apply as a mentee. Your name and email, your career or education status (education level, institution, and an optional GPA and transcript), your resume, an optional LinkedIn or personal website link, the country, city, and time zone you will be in during the program, your weekly availability, your written answers (career plans, experience, engagement with AI safety, project-specific answers, and anything else you choose to tell us), and how you heard about SPAR. You control what your resume and written answers include.

When you apply as a mentor. Your name and email, career status, affiliations, time zone, a short bio, links you provide, a photo, and your project proposals, including any funding needs.

If you take a technical assessment. We invite some technical applicants to a skills assessment run by CodeSignal. We receive your results and use them alongside the rest of your application.

While you participate. Project and enrollment records, check-ins, reports, mentor feedback, survey responses, Demo Day submissions, awards, certificate records, and your activity in the SPAR Slack workspace and program tools.

Automatically. Usage data on our sites (pages visited, interactions, approximate location from your IP address, and device and browser information), collected through PostHog analytics. On the logged-in dashboard, this activity is linked to your account, and we may record how the interface is used to debug problems. Only SPAR staff view these recordings, which are stored by our analytics provider. We use this data to fix problems and improve the program, never for advertising.

From other sources. When we review applications, we may look up information you pointed us to or that is publicly available about your work. This can include your LinkedIn profile, publication records on Google Scholar, OpenAlex, and arXiv, your GitHub activity, competitive-programming profiles, and posts on public research forums. We use these lookups to verify what applications claim, and we keep what we find with your application. If you participated in SPAR before, we also use our records from earlier rounds, including your mentor's feedback, when reviewing a new application.

How we use information

• To run the application process. We review applications, verify claims, match applicants with projects, and communicate decisions.
• To run the program. We manage projects, track participation and reports, issue certificates, run events like Demo Day, and support participants.
• To keep in touch. We send program emails to applicants and participants, and news about future rounds only if you opted in.
• To improve SPAR. We analyze applications and outcomes, mostly in aggregate, to understand and improve the program.
• To keep SPAR safe and lawful. We enforce program rules (including the rule against AI-written applications), prevent fraud and abuse, and comply with legal obligations.

How we review applications, including with AI

We want you to know how this works before you apply.

Every submitted mentee application receives an AI-generated evaluation. A large language model (currently Claude, made by Anthropic) reads your application and resume, can look up the public sources described above, and produces scores, a summary, and an analysis. Mentors see this evaluation next to your application and use it as decision support. We also run an AI-writing detector (Pangram) over your written answers to check compliance with the rule that answers are your own writing.

People make every decision. The evaluation cannot output an acceptance or a rejection, and no score or detector verdict triggers any automatic action. Mentors choose whom to interview and shortlist. A matching step then combines mentor shortlists with applicant preferences, and SPAR staff review and finalize every match, including any call on a suspected rule violation.

Mentor applications are reviewed by SPAR staff, who may use AI tools to assist their review. The same principle applies there too, since a person makes and is accountable for every decision.

If you think an evaluation or a decision got something wrong about you, or you want to know more about how your application was reviewed, email spar@kairos-project.org. A person will look at your case and, where warranted, re-review your application without the AI evaluation.

Legal bases (EEA and UK)

If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, we process your information on these legal bases. Processing your application and running the program are steps taken at your request before and under our program relationship with you. Verifying application claims, looking up public sources, screening for AI-written text, improving the program, and securing our systems rest on our legitimate interest in running a fair, high-quality program. Optional data sharing and email updates about future rounds rest on your consent, which you can withdraw at any time. Website analytics rest on our legitimate interest in understanding how our sites are used. Some retention and disclosures are required by law.

How we share information

Service providers. We use vendors to run SPAR, and they process data only to provide their service to us: our application database, website and dashboard hosting, the AI model provider that runs the application evaluation (named above, under commercial terms that do not allow training on your data), the AI-writing detection service, a technical-assessment platform, analytics, email delivery, the participant Slack workspace, our program-guide and survey tools, the analysis tools we use to audit and improve the AI evaluation, and the lookup data providers we query during review (for LinkedIn and Google Scholar data).

Mentors. Mentors of the projects you apply to see your application materials and the AI evaluation. They do not see the sections the form marks as hidden from mentors, such as your data-sharing choices and feedback to us.

Other participants. If you are accepted, your name and email appear in the participant Slack workspace and the cohort directory so your team and cohort can work with you.

The public. If you are accepted as a mentor, your name, affiliation, bio, photo, links, and project description are published on sparai.org. If you complete the program as a mentee, we issue a certificate page showing your name, cohort, and completion date at a link only you receive, which you can share. Demo Day materials and research outputs from your project may name you as a contributor. We will take down or anonymize your certificate or other program-page content about you on request.

Programs you choose to join. We sometimes offer optional programs that share data with other organizations, such as providing references or supporting evaluations of SPAR's impact. Each of these programs has its own separate consent checkbox, unticked by default and hidden from reviewers, and declining never affects your application or participation. The active options and exactly what each one shares are described where we ask for the consent. You can withdraw any of these consents at any time by emailing us, with effect going forward.

Legal and safety. We share information when the law requires it, to protect the rights and safety of any person, or with our professional advisors. If Kairos ever reorganizes or transfers the program, the data moves with it under this policy.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for advertising.

International transfers

Kairos is based in the United States, and the vendors above process data there. When you apply from outside the US, you send your information directly to us in the US. Wherever your data is processed, this policy and our vendor contracts protect it, and if you are in the EEA or UK you keep all the rights described below.

How long we keep information

• Applications that do not lead to participation: we delete or de-identify them no later than 4 years after the round's application period closes. Keeping them until then lets us recognize returning applicants across rounds and understand our program over time.
• Participant records: we keep them for as long as they stay useful for recognizing returning participants and for supporting you as an alum (certificates, references, invitations to later opportunities). You can ask us to delete them at any time.
• Summary AI evaluation scores follow the application they belong to. The detailed records behind them (the model's full write-up and research trace) are deleted within 18 months of the round closing, since they are only needed for quality control and for re-examining recent decisions.
• Copies in backups, logs, and archives can take a few months longer to age out.
• Certificates and published research outputs are meant to last, so we keep them until you ask us to take yours down.
• If you opted into a data-sharing program, the data shared under that consent is kept for as long as the consent stands.
• We keep some records longer where the law requires it or where they are needed for legal claims, security, or proof of performance.

Your rights and choices

Wherever you live, you can email spar@kairos-project.org about your information. The fastest path is usually to ask your specific question directly, for example whether we looked at a particular public profile, or how your application was handled, and we will answer it. You can also ask us to correct information we hold, to delete it, to re-review your application as described above, or to tell you what information we hold about you. We honor all of these as a matter of policy, not only where the law requires it. We will verify the request comes from you, usually by replying to the email address on your application. If you ask us to delete an application that is still under review, we will treat that as withdrawing it.

If you are in the EEA or the UK, you additionally have the legal rights to access, rectification, erasure, restriction of processing, objection to processing based on legitimate interests, and data portability, and you can withdraw any consent at any time without affecting prior processing. You also have the right to complain to your supervisory authority, which in the UK is the Information Commissioner's Office.

Some limits apply. We may keep what the law requires us to keep, along with records we need for security, for legal claims, or to enforce program rules, such as a record of a rule violation. Feedback given to us in confidence by others may be protected, in which case we will tell you it exists without disclosing its source. If requests are clearly abusive or repetitive, we may decline them, as data-protection law allows.

If you are under 18

SPAR is open to people 13 and older. Do not apply if you are under 13, and if we learn we hold personal information about a child under 13, we will delete it.

If you are under 18, tell us in your application. Before you can participate, we will need a parent or legal guardian to consent for you. We exclude participants we know are under 18 from the optional data-sharing programs described above.

Security

We limit access to personal information to the people who need it to run the program, and our vendors encrypt data in transit and at rest. No system is perfectly secure. If a breach puts your data at risk, we will tell you promptly.

Changes to this policy

When we change this policy, we will update it here with a new date. If a change materially affects how we handle your information, we will email the people it affects before it takes effect. If we ever want to use information we already hold for a purpose this policy does not cover, we will either ask for your consent or keep handling that information under the rules that applied when we collected it.

Contact

Email spar@kairos-project.org, or write to Kairos AI Project, Inc., 131 Continental Dr., Suite 305, Newark, Delaware 19713, United States. If you need this policy in another format, tell us and we will help.