Announcing the Decision Provenance Standard

The Decision Provenance Standard™ · v1.0 · open standard, CC-BY 4.0

An open standard for how decisions get made — and stay accountable

The Decision Provenance Standard™ is now available, v1.0, as an open standard published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0).

What it is

The Standard is a record format: a defined, closed set of building blocks for writing down how a consequential decision was made — by whom, against what information, with what review, and at what moment it was affirmed. It works whether a human or an AI produced the underlying analysis. The whole Standard rests on four primitives: the Charter (which binds a recurring decision class to one named owner, a declared dispatch mode, a schedule of records, and the triggers that reopen the decision); the two-Mode dispatch grammar (Mode 1, Human-Led and AI-Enforced; Mode 2, AI-Led and Human-Reviewed); the affirmation-and-seal lifecycle (a record reaches sealed status only when a named human signs it — never by elapsed time or default); and self-declared conformance levels.

Why now

AI is authoring more of the analysis, drafting, and recommendation that sit underneath consequential decisions. That shift creates a gap: when the underlying work can be machine-generated, who is responsible for the decision can quietly blur, and how it was decided can become impossible to reconstruct after the fact. The Standard closes that gap on purpose. Its central commitment is that a named human signature gates every consequential record, which is how responsibility stays human as AI does more of the work underneath it.

What's available

The release is a small, self-contained set, all under CC-BY 4.0:

• The core Standard (the four primitives, the record schema, the lifecycle, and the conformance levels).
• Four Companions: regulatory cross-references, a worked-charter library, implementation guidance, and the diagrams.
• An Appendix for governance and references.
• A working open-source reference implementation, published separately under the MIT License — a real artifact you may consult, though it is not the Standard and the Standard does not depend on it.

The name is a protected trademark; a Founding Steward governs the text but does not certify anyone's conformance.

How to start

Adoption is voluntary and incremental. The path is Charter-first: pick one real recurring decision, author a single Charter for it, name the one human accountable, declare whether it dispatches in Mode 1 or Mode 2, begin producing records, and self-declare Conformance Level 1. From there, work upward toward Level 2 and Level 3 against the named criteria. One Charter, run honestly, is a conformant start.

What it is — and is not

The records the Standard produces are audit-ready decision provenance: structured input that counsel and auditors convert into evidence, certifications, or attestations. They are input, not evidence on their own — not certification, not attestation. The Standard informs frameworks without satisfying them: a record may be cited as supporting input under NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 42001, the EU AI Act, and equivalents, but it does not itself satisfy any control, requirement, or audit obligation. Conformance is self-declared; no body certifies it. And the Standard is not legal advice and not a regulatory substitute — it structures the inputs, and the human professional's review is what gives any implementation its weight.

Jurisdiction assumed: U.S. federal and Delaware (primary); United Kingdom, the European Union, and Israel (named secondaries). For any other jurisdiction, treat every statement here as a hypothesis to verify with local counsel.