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The Provael™ open-core promise

Version 1.0 — 2026-07-23. A durable stewardship pledge. This page states, plainly and with a date, what will always be free in Provael™ and what the single paid surface is — so a team can adopt the open core without worrying it will be hollowed out later. It complements the technical open-core boundary in the README; where the two ever disagree, the more generous reading of this promise wins.

Always free — Apache-2.0, forever

Everything you need to red-team a VLA policy and produce evidence is free, open-source (Apache-2.0), and runs on a plain CPU with no account and no key:

  • The CLI and the entire engine (policies, suites, runner, report).
  • Every attack family — including the EAI03 backdoor objective-decoupled trigger screen. New attack families we ship are free too.
  • The ASR + 95% Wilson CI + benign false-positive control + clean-task-success control, and predicate calibration.
  • The per-family transfer-test (rate + CI + benign-FPR + honest real-transfer / stub-validated label).
  • Every evidence export: SARIF, OSCAL, AVID, the CycloneDX ML-BOM, and the compliance crosswalk.
  • The GitHub Action for CI gating.
  • The Embodied AI Security Top 10 — a separate, CC-BY-SA community document (see below).
  • Local attest — a digest-bound, Ed25519-signed attestation signed with your own key, including the --profile assurance views.
  • The self-hosted reference server (provael serve, the [hosted] extra) producing self-signed attestations.

The single paid surface

Exactly one thing is sold, and it is an operated service, not code:

  • An attestation signed with a published, stable project key — one key an insurer or Notified Body can add to its trust store, rather than verifying a different operator key per run — and the compliance report built on top of it.

Deliberately not called authoritative: a signature proves who signed, never that the signer is to be believed. Trust is the verifier's decision, made by adding a key to their own store (see :mod:provael.attest), and the reference server labels every signature it makes as untrusted for exactly that reason.

The paid entitlement check lives only on the operated service; it never touches the free core, and the open tool never gates the local stub or real-model path.

The commitment

  • We will never move a feature from free to paid. A capability that is free today stays free.
  • The free core will never be crippled to sell the paid surface — no artificial limits, no "community edition" nerfs, no telemetry required to run it.
  • If a future paid capability is added, it will be additive (a new operated service), and this page will be updated with a new dated version — the free list above only ever grows.
  • The Embodied AI Security Top 10 is a community standard under CC-BY-SA, kept deliberately unbranded and donatable — it is not a Provael™ product and will never be paywalled. Provael™ (the tool + name) is a trademark; the standard is separate. See TRADEMARKS.

Signed by the maintainers, 2026-07-23. Supersedes no prior promise; this is v1.0.