Open Arsenal

Human Directed Evolution for AI Specifications

SpecDNA is an open specification for AI agents that modify, fork, extend, and evolve existing specifications while preserving the provenance, licensing, attribution, and human intent associated with every generation. It establishes a structured lineage for specification evolution so that an AI created modification cannot become detached from the specification, creators, licenses, and transformation history from which it originated. SpecDNA treats provenance as an essential part of the specification itself, ensuring that every fork carries a traceable record of its ancestry.

SpecDNA places the human in the loop as the authority over specification evolution. A human provides the instructions, requirements, constraints, or design objectives that direct an AI agent, while the agent analyzes the existing specification and determines how those instructions can be implemented. The system distinguishes inherited content, human modifications, AI generated content, third party material, and removed or transformed content. Human decisions, prompts, approvals, rejections, and significant transformation events can be recorded as part of the provenance chain, creating an auditable relationship between human intent and the resulting specification.

SpecDNA includes modular intellectual property analysis designed to identify potential copyright, patent, licensing, attribution, and derivative work conflicts before a modified specification is finalized. AI agents can assign risk scores, identify potentially problematic material, explain the basis for those scores, and recommend alterations or design arounds intended to reduce potential conflicts while preserving the human’s intended functionality or objectives. These assessments are advisory rather than legal determinations, allowing organizations to integrate additional legal review, patent databases, copyright resources, similarity analysis, repository scanning, and other specialized capabilities through optional modules.

SpecDNA also requires the preservation and generation of formal licensing and attribution records throughout the evolution process. When an AI agent creates a fork, derivative version, or substantial modification, it creates or updates notice.md with the known version lineage, previous creators, source specifications, licenses, attribution requirements, transformation history, current creator, and description of the new creation or modification. Through its provenance, compliance, risk analysis, human review, audit, and extensible plugin modules, SpecDNA provides a framework for specification evolution in which innovation can occur without erasing the history, rights, contributions, or human direction that made each new generation possible.

This specification is licensed under AGPL-3.0+ and is free to use with required Section 7 attribution. Attribution-free deployment is available through a Specification Branding License, with fees based on use and deployment scope.