What We Mean by State Support
State support is not about deciding what a person should feel. It is about helping a person recover enough clarity and agency to remain fully their own.
For us, state support does not mean controlling emotion, flattening discomfort, or pushing people toward a single, standardized ideal mental state.
It means helping a person recover enough stability, clarity, and agency to rest, reflect, decide, and continue living as themselves.
We do not believe every form of pain should be removed. Some forms of discomfort carry meaning. Grief, hesitation, guilt, alertness, and emotional tension can all contain information about relationships, values, risk, and reality.
Our role is not to erase the human condition. Our role is to offer appropriate support when a person is overwhelmed, dysregulated, unable to recover, or unable to rest.
Our Core Ethical Position
The highest goal of this technology is not comfort at all costs. It is the restoration of autonomy.
We do not build systems to define how a person should feel.
We build systems that, with the user’s knowledge and permission, may help them return to a more restorable, more functional, and more self-directed state.
That means our products should never aim to make people more obedient, easier to manage, more commercially responsive, or less able to exercise judgment.
If a system reduces a person’s agency in the name of helping them, then it has crossed an ethical boundary.
The Principles We Work From
These principles are the frame for how we think about state support, user control, safety, recovery, and responsible influence.
Autonomy Comes First
The user must remain the primary owner of their own state. Our role is to support recovery, not replace selfhood.
Support Should Be Minimal, Proportionate, and Restrained
We aim for the least intervention necessary to help a person return to a usable and self-directed state. We do not equate numbness, passivity, or overdependence with improvement.
Transparency Matters
People should be able to understand when support is being offered, what kind of support is being provided, and how they can pause, reduce, or turn it off.
Safety Matters More Than Optimization
When experience design conflicts with human safety or dignity, safety must come first. When business incentives conflict with user interest, user interest must come first.
Not All Discomfort Is Failure
We do not assume that every negative feeling is a defect to be corrected. Human experience includes necessary discomfort, and responsible technology must respect that.
When Support Is Appropriate
Support is justified when it helps restore capacity and does so with the user’s knowledge, permission, and interest at the center.
We believe state support can be appropriate when a person is clearly overwhelmed, unable to settle, unable to recover, or unable to rest, and when they want support.
At the current stage of our work, this applies most clearly to pre-sleep regulation and restorative use cases, where the goal is to help a person move toward rest, not to overpower their awareness or remove their agency.
Support is appropriate when it helps restore capacity. It becomes ethically questionable when it begins to replace judgment, suppress meaningful experience, or serve someone other than the user.
When We Choose Restraint
There are moments when intervention is possible but not justified. In those moments, restraint is part of safety.
We do not believe meaningful grief, moral conflict, or reality-based distress should automatically be flattened by a system.
We do not believe a third party should be able to define a user’s desired state without the user’s informed agreement.
We do not believe systems like ours should push a person toward sedation, reduced responsiveness, or lowered judgment in situations that require alertness, reflection, or real-world decision-making.
When a situation may fall outside the boundaries of general state support, we believe the system should become more cautious, not more aggressive.
What We Will Not Build Toward
Capability does not justify every direction. These are boundaries we intend to keep visible and explicit.
- We will not build hidden emotional manipulation.
- We will not design for compliance, dependency, or behavioral shaping in the service of conversion, engagement, or institutional convenience.
- We will not market state support as a substitute for all forms of care, judgment, or medical responsibility.
- We will not describe our capabilities more broadly than the evidence allows.
- We will not reduce people to a single optimized emotional template.
A system may become impressive long before it becomes trustworthy. We would rather narrow a claim than overreach a responsibility.
User Rights
People should be able to understand what the system is doing, why it is doing it, and how to change or stop it.
We believe users should know what a system is doing, why it is doing it, and how to stop it.
They should be able to choose whether support is enabled, what kinds of support they are comfortable with, and whether they want automated or manual control.
As our systems evolve, we intend to preserve this direction: more clarity, more user control, and stronger boundaries around automated influence.
A Living Commitment
This page is not a static declaration. It is a standard we expect to revisit as power, evidence, and responsibility expand.
We do not see this page as branding language. We see it as a standing commitment.
As our capabilities grow, our ethical responsibilities grow with them.
We expect to revise these principles over time. But the direction will remain the same: define limits before expanding power, and protect human agency before optimizing experience.
Technology is not only defined by what it can do. It is also defined by what it chooses not to do.