Architecture Overview

Sovereign Source AI treats sovereignty as a property of the whole system that does your work. An organization has control when it can inspect, govern, change, move, and operate its own logic and infrastructure. Seven layers divide the responsibilities in that system. Four planes connect these layers from the start to the end of the work. Together, they keep a link between the goal, the approved action, the checked result, and the evidence for the next task.

Seven layers

The layers keep responsibilities apart. Without them, these responsibilities mix together inside an application, an agent, or a provider.

  1. Intent states what a person or institution wants to do. It links the goal to requirements, constraints, authority, and measurable outcomes.
  2. Governance sets who can act and when. It covers data class, jurisdiction, approvals, and the models, tools, and networks that an actor can use.
  3. Decision selects or proposes an action. It uses rules, bounded models, statistical inference, language models, or human judgment.
  4. Capability lists the operations that an actor can do. Each operation has declared inputs, outputs, permissions, and limits.
  5. Execution does the approved work. It uses isolated agents, workers, workflows, and services.
  6. Verification checks that the result is correct, safe, approved, and useful. It uses tests, evaluations, human review, and outcome measures.
  7. Evidence records where each item came from. It links intent, decisions, and actions to the artifacts, approvals, deployments, and outcomes that follow.

The seven layers are responsibilities. You do not need seven separate services. A reference build can combine components, but it must keep clear boundaries between the parts that reason, permit, act, and prove.

Four planes

The four planes are Intention, Governance, Verification, and Evidence. The planes group the seven layers into four long-term views.

Intention records why the work exists. This includes the observations and the decisions of the organization that justify the work. Governance applies to each stage: the plan, the selection of capabilities, the execution, and the release. Verification examines the intermediate results and the final outcome. Evidence connects all of these stages into a history that you can rebuild.

Decision, Capability, and Execution do the work inside these planes. They change approved goals into bounded actions. You can replace these three layers, and the institution keeps its intent, policy, verification duties, and evidence.

Thus, the planes stay in place from the start to the end of the work. Governance applies before a model gets data, and again before each important action. Evidence starts with the source of an intent and continues after deployment.

The six-step loop

Intent → Decide → Constrain → Execute → Verify → Prove

Each step has one job:

  1. Intent sets the outcome that you want.
  2. Decide makes a candidate plan or choice.
  3. Constrain applies authority, policy, and capability limits.
  4. Execute does the approved work.
  5. Verify evaluates the result.
  6. Prove keeps the records and the links between them.

Governance applies before the model reasons. Policy also limits which data and which decision providers can take part. The Constrain step shows which proposed actions are approved.

The outcome closes the loop. A release can be technically correct and still not solve the original problem. If the results show a problem, the team can change the requirements or start a new intent. Each change gets its own review and approval.

Reference build

A reference build has these parts:

Typed contracts connect these components. The ontology of the institution gives one definition for actors, resources, requirements, actions, and outcomes. You can replace interfaces and runtime products, because the organization owns the canonical objects and their relationships.

This is a proposed design. We have not built all of it yet. Do not assume that each deployment target, attestation mechanism, or product layer exists.

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