Open Arsenal

Build systems where the people creating value share in it.

Sovereign is an AGPL-3.0+ specification for an AI system designed to transform dependency-based technologies, platforms, business models, workflows, and institutional systems into independently implementable alternatives. Its purpose is to identify who owns a system, who controls it, who creates its value, who captures that value, and where users are dependent on vendors, proprietary infrastructure, centralized services, or closed technologies. Sovereign then uses that analysis to design alternatives centered on technological autonomy, portability, user ownership, economic participation, and the ability to operate independently.

Sovereign is designed around stand-alone and federated operation. It provides a framework for developing systems that can be self-hosted, independently administered, migrated, forked where permitted, and operated without mandatory dependence on a particular vendor or cloud provider. Its Right-to-Leave Architecture requires systems to provide practical pathways for exporting data, migrating identities and records where possible, replacing dependencies, and continuing operations after leaving a provider. Its Corporate Exit Simulator evaluates what happens when a critical vendor disappears, raises prices, terminates an API, changes its licensing terms, or otherwise becomes unavailable, then generates strategies for replacing those dependencies.

The specification also includes a Reproducibility Engine for preserving research, development, experiments, models, datasets, configurations, dependencies, and provenance so that independent parties can reproduce work without privileged access to the original organization. Its intellectual-property and clean-room frameworks help distinguish functional requirements from protected expression and identify potential copyright, patent, licensing, and confidentiality concerns while encouraging independently developed implementations. Sovereign does not claim to guarantee non-infringement, but instead provides a structured process for identifying risks and developing alternatives.

Sovereign treats economic participation as a core architectural concern. Its economic analysis identifies who contributes labor, data, research, capital, infrastructure, and other forms of value, then examines where the resulting economic value is captured. It can model cooperative, community-owned, participant-owned, federated, and other economic structures designed to allow people creating value to share in it. The Anti-Capture Module evaluates whether ownership, governance, infrastructure, funding, data, or technical dependencies could become concentrated enough to undermine participant autonomy.

Sovereign also establishes a Sovereign Certification framework for measuring portability, independence, replaceability, federation, economic participation, reproducibility, resilience, anti-capture protections, and long-term operational independence. The Sovereign Bill of Rights defines participant-centered principles including the right to understand, access, export, leave, operate, replace, fork where permitted, federate, participate in value, understand economic flows, preserve research provenance, reproduce published work where possible, and maintain meaningful human control over consequential systems.

Together, these features make Sovereign more than an AI application. It is a specification and methodology for analyzing existing systems and designing alternatives that people can understand, build, operate, govern, reproduce, migrate, and sustain independently. Its guiding principle is simple: Build systems where the people creating value share in it.

This specification is released under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 or later (AGPL-3.0+) and is free to use with required attribution. Attribution-free deployment is available through a Specification Branding License, with fees based on deployment scope and network size.