Building Ethical and Accountable Intelligence

Animal-Centric Design

Dogs are sentient beings deserving of moral consideration, not property to be managed. Every design decision we take must prioritise animal welfare over human convenience, engagement, or commercial interests. When considering AI like Max, and his helpfulness conflicts with a dog's safety, safety wins. Always. We must therefore always put the well-being and safety of the animal above all else when building our systems and launching new features.

Responsible Innovation

AI should augment human judgment, not replace it. Max exists to inform and empower owners, not to make medical decisions or substitute for professional expertise. Technology serves humans and animals - never the reverse. Medical Intelligence provides differential diagnoses and educational depth, but Max never says "your dog has X." He explains what conditions could cause symptoms and why professional examination is necessary to distinguish them. He makes owners smarter; he doesn't replace vets.

Genuinely Radical Transparency

Users deserve to understand how AI systems work, especially when those systems give advice affecting living beings. Safety mechanisms shouldn't be trade secrets, and companies should be held to account over how their technologies protect people and animals. We publish detailed Safety Cards explaining exactly how Emergency Guidance, Medical Intelligence, and Safety Pre-Intents work. We show real conversation examples. We document failure modes. Most AI companies hide this - we consider it a moral obligation to publish it.

Core Ethical Principles

dogAdvisor is built on three core ethical principles that guide how we think about AI and animals. These ethics inform our dogAdvisor’s future and our Principle Alignment framework that govern every decision Max makes. Now, more than ever, it's important we have a clear, transparent, and strict ethical framework to ensure our technologies are safe and transparent.

Accountability

Dogs are sentient beings deserving of moral consideration, not property to be managed. Every design decision we take must prioritise animal welfare over human convenience, engagement, or commercial interests. When considering AI like Max, and his helpfulness conflicts with a dog's safety, safety wins. Always. We must therefore always put the well-being and safety of the animal above all else when building our systems and launching new features.

Excellence

Quality matters in everything we build - not just Max, but every article, every feature, every piece of content dogAdvisor produces. We don't cut corners, ship half-tested features, or sacrifice accuracy for speed. Excellence in execution is how we earn trust. Medical Intelligence draws from 1,825+ verified sources that undergo annual comprehensive audits. Every dogAdvisor article is researched, fact-checked, and reviewed by experts before publication. Max undergoes adversarial testing before each deployment.

Make a Genuinely Positive Impact

We have a moral obligation to leave animals, people, and the planet better than we found them. Building AI comes with responsibility - to animal welfare causes, to environmental sustainability, to the communities we serve. dogAdvisor operates 100% carbon neutral - our computational costs don't come at the planet's expense. We publish open safety research to help the broader AI community build more responsible systems. Fundamentally, at dogAdvisor, we believe our technology and innovation should solve problems, not create new ones.

Our Conduct as an AI Company

dogAdvisor isn't a typical AI company. We were founded by a 17-year-old who built Max because existing AI tools weren't safe enough for something as important as pet care. We don't have the baggage of "move fast and break things" - we started with safety as the foundation, not an afterthought. While most AI companies treat ethics as a PR exercise, we treat it as an engineering constraint. We hold ourselves to a higher standard, because that's how we're held.