Medical, Legal & Professional Disclaimer

1. Not a medical device or medical advice

Mold Scanner AI is not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and is not classified as a medical device under any regulatory framework. The Services do not diagnose, treat, cure, mitigate, or prevent any disease, condition, or health outcome.

When our website or app discusses health topics (for example, Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome, mycotoxin exposure, mold allergies, respiratory symptoms, mast cell activation, environmental sensitivities, BREESI / QEESI / CIRS-VCS screening instruments), we are summarizing published research and publicly available expert protocols for educational purposes only. That content is not medical advice for your specific situation.

Never disregard professional medical advice, delay seeking it, or stop a treatment because of anything you read on our website or see in our tools. Always consult a licensed healthcare provider who knows you and your medical history before making health decisions.

If you are experiencing a medical emergency, call 911 (or your local emergency number) or go to the nearest emergency room.

2. Not a professional mold inspection

Mold Scanner AI does not replace a certified mold inspection by a professional credentialed by IICRC (Institute of Inspection, Cleaning and Restoration Certification), ACAC (American Council for Accredited Certification), or any state licensing body. A phone camera and AI model cannot perform what a trained inspector does in person. Specifically, we cannot:

• See hidden mold. Growth inside wall cavities, under flooring, behind cabinets or wallpaper, inside HVAC ducts, above drop ceilings, or in crawl spaces is invisible to a camera. Only physical inspection and/or invasive testing can confirm it.
• Identify species. The AI can note that a visual pattern resembles mold species "X" based on image features, but visual identification is not laboratory identification. Only a certified lab using microscopy, culture, or PCR can identify genus and species and whether a given sample produces mycotoxins.
• Measure moisture. A professional inspector uses pin and pinless moisture meters, thermohygrometers, and infrared cameras to locate moisture. We cannot measure moisture content from a photograph.
• Measure airborne spore counts, mycotoxins, or VOCs. These require air sampling, surface sampling, and lab analysis.
• Assess structural integrity. We cannot evaluate damage to framing, subfloors, joists, sheathing, roof decking, or load-bearing elements.
• Trace water sources. We can suggest likely sources from visible clues, but we cannot trace plumbing leaks, envelope failures, or HVAC condensation issues without in-person investigation.
• Produce a report admissible in court, insurance claims, or real-estate disclosures. Jurisdictions and carriers have specific requirements for admissible assessments; our output is not designed to meet them.

Where our tool output suggests there may be a problem, the appropriate next step is to retain a credentialed inspector. Do not make remediation decisions based solely on our output.

3. Not legal advice; no attorney-client relationship

Our Services include tools that generate draft documents (for example, the Tenant Mold Complaint Letter + Photo Log) and educational content that discusses legal topics (landlord-tenant law, warranty of habitability, insurance claims, real-estate disclosure). None of this is legal advice and none of it should be treated as legal advice.

Using our Services does not create an attorney-client relationship. We are not a law firm, and our staff are not your attorneys. We do not practice law. The output of any document-drafting tool is a starting template that must be reviewed, customized, and, before it is sent to any landlord, opposing party, insurance carrier, or government agency, approved by a licensed attorney (or a qualified legal-aid clinic) in your specific jurisdiction.

Laws vary by state, county, and city. A template that is protective in one jurisdiction may be insufficient, irrelevant, or actively harmful in another. Communications you send can become evidence; some jurisdictions have strict rules on cure notices, retaliation protections, service of process, written demand procedures, and habitability claims. The wrong form, wrong timing, or wrong recipient can weaken, or forfeit, your rights.

If you are considering litigation, an insurance claim, a disclosure obligation, a lease dispute, a habitability complaint, or any other legally significant action, consult a licensed attorney.

4. Not insurance, appraisal, or real-estate advice

Our Services do not provide insurance adjustment, appraisal, inspection for resale, or real-estate disclosure advice. Insurance carriers and real-estate transactions have specific evidentiary and procedural requirements that our educational output does not satisfy. Do not submit tool output to an insurance carrier or a real-estate counterparty as evidence without an independent licensed assessment.

5. What our AI can and cannot do

Our photo analysis is powered by large multimodal AI models operated by third-party providers (currently Anthropic's Claude family). These models are probabilistic pattern matchers trained on visual and textual data. Their output is a best-effort interpretation, not a measurement. In particular:

• The model can miss real mold that is visible in the photo.
• The model can misidentify mold when what is shown is dirt, soot, shadow, water staining, paint failure, rust, mineral deposits, insect droppings, or normal building materials.
• The model can produce "hallucinations", confidently stated details that are not present in the photo or are factually incorrect.
• The model's knowledge has a training-data cutoff and may not reflect the latest published research or current product recommendations.
• The model cannot verify facts you assert in questionnaire answers and cannot detect when inputs are incorrect, mistaken, or intentionally misleading.

We use a "forensic" system prompt that instructs the model to be conservative, for example, to downgrade a CLEAR verdict to SUSPICIOUS when model confidence that an area is clear falls below a preset threshold. This is a prudence heuristic, not a clinical guarantee. False negatives and false positives are both possible.

6. Confidence scores are heuristic

When a report shows a numeric confidence (for example, "87% confident this is mold"), that number is a heuristic expression of the model's visual match to training patterns. It is not a statistical probability of mold presence, a clinical test sensitivity/specificity, an independently benchmarked accuracy figure, or a dollar risk estimate. Any use of percentages on our interfaces is a categorical indicator dressed in numeric clothing, comparable to "high match," "moderate match," or "low match", not a precise probability.

Do not treat any percentage we show as a mathematical probability or as evidence for a decision with financial, health, or legal consequences. We are continuing to work on how we present confidence and may migrate to purely categorical labels (such as "High visual match" / "Moderate visual match" / "Low visual match") to avoid any implication of numeric precision.

7. Photo quality, framing, and lighting affect the output

The quality of our analysis depends on the quality of the photo you submit. Blurry images, extreme glare, heavy shadows, partial framing, HDR artifacts, or filters can all reduce accuracy. A bad photo will produce a bad analysis. We make a best effort to flag image-quality issues in our output, but we cannot catch every case.

8. Health-information sources and intended use

The health information on our website and in our tools is sourced from, among others:

• Federal and international agencies, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), World Health Organization (WHO), OSHA.
• Peer-reviewed research, published studies in journals including Indoor Air, Nature, Mayo Clinic Proceedings, the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, and others.
• Recognized clinical and environmental-health experts, leading researchers in environmental medicine, mold illness, mycotoxin exposure, and mast cell activation.
• Validated screening instruments, BREESI (Palmer RF et al. IJERPH 2021), QEESI (Miller CS, 1999), CIRS-VCS (Shoemaker protocol).
• Industry standards, IICRC S520 (Standard for Professional Mold Remediation).

These are respected sources, but their underlying findings have not been independently validated for use in this specific delivery method (AI photo analysis combined with educational questionnaires). We are summarizing published research for educational purposes. Where we reference a specific screening instrument (for example, BREESI, QEESI, or CIRS-VCS), we do so as a citation to the published literature only. We do not administer these instruments, we do not return a clinical "result" or diagnostic score tied to any specific instrument, and nothing we provide should be treated as a substitute for the original instrument as administered by a qualified clinician.

For a full citation list, see our studies page (where published).

9. When to get professional help

Retain a credentialed mold inspector (IICRC or ACAC certified, or state-licensed where applicable) when any of the following apply:

• Our tool flags SUSPICIOUS or CONFIRMED mold in multiple rooms, or in critical systems (HVAC, crawl space, attic, wall cavities).
• You smell a persistent musty odor but cannot identify visible mold.
• You have had water damage, flooding, a roof leak, a plumbing leak, or a condensation problem.
• The suspected area exceeds 10 square feet (the EPA threshold that generally triggers a professional remediation recommendation).
• You or a household member has unexplained or chronic health symptoms that may be environment-related.
• You are buying, selling, renting, or leasing a property.
• You are a renter and need documentation for your landlord, your insurer, or legal proceedings.
• Any party may rely on the assessment for financial, medical, legal, or insurance decisions.

10. When to see a doctor

Consult a licensed healthcare provider (and, where appropriate, one experienced in environmental medicine) when:

• You have symptoms that started or worsened after moving into a new home, workplace, or building.
• You have chronic symptoms (more than four weeks) that do not respond to standard treatment.
• Multiple members of the same household or workplace have similar symptoms.
• You have been diagnosed with conditions such as chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, or "unexplained" symptoms and live or work in a building with known moisture problems.
• You have immunocompromise, severe asthma, or another condition that increases risk from mold exposure.
• You are pregnant or caring for an infant and suspect a mold exposure.

11. Affiliate disclosures

Some pages on our website reference third-party products (for example, dehumidifiers, air purifiers, mold-cleaning products, at-home test kits). Where we link to an external store, we may earn a commission if you purchase through that link, at no additional cost to you. Affiliate earnings do not influence the substance of our editorial recommendations, and we do not accept payment to include a product. Where a relationship exists, it is disclosed on the page in accordance with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's Endorsement Guides.

12. Contact

Questions about this disclaimer? Email hello@moldscanner.ai. For related policies, see our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.