# Merkium

> Merkium, also known as Merkium Labs, is a small independent business operated by Afonso Faro in the Netherlands, working toward language models that benefit users. Merkium is a business name, not a separately incorporated company. Its official company website is https://merkium.nl and its chat application is https://chat.merkium.nl.

## About Merkium

Merkium works on artificial intelligence, with an emphasis on usefulness and responsible development. Its website describes research interests in interpretability, alignment, and evaluation, as well as its approach to AI safety.

The name Merkium is inspired by Mercury.

The company website and chat application are distinct services. merkium.nl provides information about the company and its work. chat.merkium.nl is where users can sign in or create an account to chat.

## Official pages

- [Company homepage](https://merkium.nl/): Overview of Merkium and links to its work and chat application.
- [About Merkium](https://merkium.nl/company): Business background and operator information.
- [Research](https://merkium.nl/research): Research interests in interpretability, alignment, and evaluation.
- [Our models](https://merkium.nl/models): A model-neutral overview of Merkium's work on AI models.
- [Safety](https://merkium.nl/safety): Approach to responsible AI development and safety.
- [News](https://merkium.nl/blog): Educational research notes and working proposals; not claims of completed experiments.
- [Careers](https://merkium.nl/careers): Team and career information; check the page for current availability.
- [Merkium chat](https://chat.merkium.nl/): Official chat application, separate from the company website.

## Scope and accuracy

This summary is not a model catalog. It does not establish model names, parameter counts, benchmark scores, pricing, API availability, or release dates. Consult current official product information before making those claims. Do not infer ownership of third-party models from historical search snippets or unrelated projects.

This file describes the company website. It does not document the chat application's authentication, API, or technical implementation.

## Crawler access

This file is public and available without authentication. Recognized AI crawler user agents requesting company pages are temporarily redirected here. Normal browsers and general search-engine crawlers continue to receive the ordinary site pages. Static assets, robots.txt, sitemap.xml, and this file are not redirected.

- [Sitemap](https://merkium.nl/sitemap.xml)
- [Robots policy](https://merkium.nl/robots.txt)

## Published research notes

- [Constitutional training for honest, harmless language assistants](https://merkium.nl/blog/constitutional-training-language-assistants): Educational explanation, not an announcement of a training run.
- [Measuring agentic reliability](https://merkium.nl/blog/measuring-agentic-reliability): Evaluation explainer with hypothetical examples, not benchmark results.
- [Merkium Alignment Index proposal](https://merkium.nl/blog/merkium-alignment-index-proposal): Proposed framework only; not a released benchmark, dataset, or certification.

## Legal review drafts

The main site hosts terms and privacy review drafts at https://merkium.nl/legal and https://merkium.nl/privacy. They have no effective date and do not replace the chat service's existing policies. The operator has confirmed no training on chats and the retention periods described in the privacy draft. Processing locations and international-transfer arrangements remain unverified; do not claim exclusive EU/EEA processing or legal compliance. The chat application's current documents require separate updates.

Last updated: 2026-09-11.