Two paragraphs in a rewrite billed as clarity do more than restate the old ones.
Sundial Labs emailed this to every account holder on November 3, 2026. The terms take effect December 8. The summary at the top of the email runs four sentences; the document under it runs about nine thousand words, and the attached redline marks 41 clauses as changed.
Sundial is a photo and video app. The email says the terms have been rewritten to be shorter and clearer, and for most of the document that holds. Sections were renumbered, long sentences were cut, and definitions that used to sit wherever they were first needed now live together in Section 1.
Two paragraphs do something else. Section 5.2 is the license you hand Sundial over everything you upload, and it now names more uses, more parties, and one purpose the old sentence never mentioned. Section 14 has no counterpart at all in the 2024 terms: it moves disputes out of court and into individual arbitration, with thirty days to decline in writing.
5.2 License to Sundial. You grant Sundial Labs, Inc. and its affiliates a worldwide, non-exclusive,royalty-free, sublicensable license to host, store, cache, reproduce, modify,create derivative works from, publicly display, and distribute Your Contentfor the purpose of operating, providing, improving, and developing theServices, including the training and improvement of machine learning modelsused to provide the Services. Sundial will not sell Your Content to a thirdparty as a standalone work.| Aspect | Section 6.2 (March 12, 2024) | Section 5.2 (December 8, 2026) |
|---|---|---|
| Who holds the license | Sundial | Sundial Labs, Inc. and its affiliates |
| Can it be passed on | No sublicense right in the sentence | sublicensable |
| What may be done to the file | host, store, cache, reproduce, and display | host, store, cache, reproduce, modify, create derivative works from, publicly display, and distribute |
| For what purpose | operating, providing, and improving the Services | operating, providing, improving, and developing the Services |
| Model training | Not mentioned | including the training and improvement of machine learning models used to provide the Services |
| Stated limit inside the paragraph | None | No sale of Your Content to a third party as a standalone work |
| After you delete | License ends (6.4) | License ends, except for backups and anything it was already incorporated into (5.4) |
The paragraph does not sit alone. Section 5.1 says you keep ownership of what you upload, in the same words as 2024. Section 5.3 carves Content in a Private Album out of the training use in 5.2. Section 5.4 ends the license when you delete the content or close the account, then says what termination does not reach: backup media, and any index, model, or derivative work the content went into before the deletion.
Affiliate is defined for the first time in this version. Section 1.1 calls it any entity that controls, is controlled by, or is under common control with Sundial Labs, Inc., including the entities listed in Schedule 1. The 2024 terms carried no such definition, because no clause in them used the word.
What this brief could not check
- Section 1.1 defines Affiliate partly by reference to the entities listed in Schedule 1. Schedule 1 was not attached to the email and does not appear in the linked terms, so which companies the grant in 5.2 reaches could not be checked.
- Section 5.3 defines Private Album by reference to the Sundial Privacy Notice dated November 3, 2026. That notice was not provided, so whether a link-shared or unlisted album counts as private, and therefore how much the training carve-out covers, could not be checked.
- Section 14.2 incorporates the Consumer Arbitration Rules of the Consumer Arbitration Council as in effect when a claim is filed. Those rules are not part of the terms and were not read, so nothing here describes how a filing actually proceeds, including who pays the fees.
- This brief was written by hand as a design fixture. It is modelled on real work, but no model read a diff to produce it, and its claims should not be relied on.