# Model policy — Ridgeway Lane home lab

Course-authored sample document. The rules below are invented for the exercise. Replace with
your own policy once the pipeline works.

Last reviewed: 2026-09-01.

## What may be downloaded

A model may be downloaded and run if all four of these are true:

1. Its licence is recorded in the model register before the download starts.
2. The weights are published as safetensors or GGUF. Pickled checkpoints are not downloaded.
3. The publisher is the original authors, or a converter listed in the model register as
   trusted.
4. There is enough free space to hold it without falling below 300 GB free on the model disk.

A model that fails any of these may still be read about. It is not downloaded.

## Licences

Every model in the register carries its licence name and the date it was checked. Models
under a licence with an attribution condition are marked, and anything published from this
house that used one carries the attribution.

Gated models are allowed. The acceptance step is done by the account named in the register
and never by a shared account.

## What must be recorded

For every model on disk: name, publisher, quantisation, file size, source URL, licence,
the date it was downloaded and the reason it was kept. A model with no recorded reason is
deleted at the next review.

## Reviews

The register is reviewed on the first Sunday of every second month. At each review, any model
that has not been used since the previous review is deleted, unless it is named in the
current evaluation set.

## Custom code

`trust_remote_code` is not enabled for any model on tern. If a model requires it, it may be
run on petrel only, in a container, pinned to a specific commit, and never while unreleased
client work is on the machine.

## Prompts and outputs

Model output is never published without a person reading it first. Nothing generated by a
model is committed to a repository without a note in the commit message saying which model
produced it.

## Exceptions

There is one standing exception: the speech model may be run without a register entry for a
single transcription, provided it is deleted afterwards. Every other exception is written
down in this document before it is taken, with a date and a reason.