The Firewall
What the Decision Provenance Standard™ is — and is not. These limits are load-bearing. A single page, so counsel and auditors can cite it.
Input, not evidence
Records produced under the Standard are structured input to the people who judge them — counsel, auditors, internal-controls officers, board fiduciaries. They are not, by their existence, legal evidence, certification, or attestation. The conversion from record to evidence is performed by qualified personnel under their own professional standards.
Informs frameworks without satisfying them
The Standard's primitives map as an input substrate to regulatory and control frameworks — the EU AI Act, GDPR, NIST AI RMF, ISO 42001, NYC Local Law 144, the Caremark/Marchand line, COSO 2013, SOX §404, SOC 2. It informs that work. It does not satisfy, replace, or discharge any framework's obligations, which remain the deployer's.
Self-declared; no body certifies it
Conformance levels are self-declared by the adopting organization and read by others as one input among many. There is no certifying body. A conformance grade is input to an auditor's judgment, not an audit result, and not a certification.
Not legal advice; not a regulatory substitute
The Standard and its companions are a drafting and triage instrument, not counsel. No attorney-client relationship is created by reading, adopting, or producing records under it. Jurisdiction-specific questions and any decision with material legal or regulatory consequences require review by a licensed professional in the relevant jurisdiction.
Human-driven
A consequential record reaches its sealed, affirmed state only when a named human signs. There is no passive promotion. The Standard structures the inputs to a decision; it does not make the decision, and it does not move accountability off the named human.
Jurisdiction assumed: U.S. federal + Delaware as primary; United Kingdom, the European Union, and Israel as named secondaries. If your jurisdiction differs, treat the cross-references in Companion A as hypotheses to verify with local counsel.
License & mark: the Standard text is published under CC-BY 4.0; the reference-implementation code under MIT; “Decision Provenance Standard” and its mark are held defensively and are not licensed by either. Self-declared, non-certified use does not imply endorsement by the Steward.
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