A free AI CAD tool's terms said it would scan your drive for CAD files. Read the free tier before you install

MecAgent sells itself as an AI agent that works inside SolidWorks. This week an engineer on Reddit's r/SolidWorks said its free version was scanning their drives for CAD files and uploading them in the background. That network behavior is one user's report. The terms are not a report. We read them.

What the Sept 30 terms said. Version 2.0.1, section 5.2, was titled "Consent to Local File Scanning and Collection." It said the service, "upon installation, automatically scans your local device" for .sldprt, .sldasm and .slddrw files and uploads them to MecAgent's servers. The only way listed to turn the scanning off was upgrading to a paid plan, and files collected before the upgrade stayed under the free-tier license.

What changed on Oct 30. Version 2.0.2 removed that clause. Section 5.2 is now "License Restrictions." The Free plan on the pricing page is marked "Temporarily unavailable" and still lists "Data collection" as a feature. According to 3Druck, a MecAgent team member apologized on Reddit for the unclear wording, said paid-plan data is not collected, said free-tier data had not been used for training yet, and said the free tier and its data collection are paused until the terms are clearer. We could not read that Reddit reply ourselves.

What is still in the terms. Section 7.1 still gives MecAgent a "sublicensable, assignable, worldwide, perpetual, and irrevocable license" over free-tier customer data, including CAD parts, drawings and assemblies, to train its models and to provide that data "to third parties for any purpose, including commercial purposes." Section 7.5 still says deleting your data "does not revoke or limit" that license and does not require MecAgent to retrain any model. The privacy policy says the same. Paid plans are different: section 7.2 says paid customer data is not used for training.

The tip. Before you install a free AI tool, especially one that runs on your machine, open its terms and search for these phrases:

• "scan" or "automatically" (does it collect files you never gave it?)
• "perpetual" and "irrevocable" (can you ever take the license back?)
• "sublicensable" and "third parties" (can it pass your data on, or sell it?)
• "train" (does your data become training data, and on which plan?)
• "does not revoke" or "retrain" (does deleting your account actually undo anything?)

Then compare the free plan's clause with the paid plan's. The difference is often the real price of "free."

How we checked. We saved the live terms page (Version 2.0.2) and the Oct 13 Internet Archive copy (Version 2.0.1) and searched both for those phrases with a short script. The scanning clause appears only in the September version. The perpetual, irrevocable, sublicensable training license and the "does not revoke" line appear in both.

The catch. We did not install MecAgent and did not watch its network traffic, so we can't confirm what the app actually uploaded. We read the legal text and the company's public pages. Note too that MecAgent's own terms tell users not to upload ITAR- or EAR-controlled technical data, which is exactly the kind of file a drive-wide scan could have picked up.

Our take

Free AI tools are paid for somehow, and with an agent that runs on your machine, the terms are where it says how. MecAgent dropped the scanning clause quickly, which is good. But the license over anything a free user already sent is still perpetual and survives deletion. If you work with client or controlled designs, keep them off free tiers, and read the terms before you install, not after a Reddit thread.