Mechanism
Each adaptation artifact carries a licensing specification per Chapter 22 identifying the terms under which the artifact may be acquired, activated, and composed. The licensing specification is one of the artifact's structured fields, alongside the capability scope specification, the compatibility specification, the dependency specification, the certification record, the provenance-lineage record, and the artifact's authority credential identifying its issuing authority.
When a plurality of source artifacts are combined through a governed composition event, the architecture produces a governance-chain-preserving composite artifact that is itself an adaptation artifact. The composite inherits a composite authority credential derived from the source artifacts' authority credentials per governance-policy-defined authority-resolution rules, and a composite licensing specification equal to the most restrictive intersection of the source licensing specifications. The composite therefore cannot be admitted under any terms looser than the strictest term present in any contributing source.
Composition does not merely union the licensing terms. The composite also inherits a composite capability scope equal to the intersection of the source capability scopes (or the union where governance-policy-defined), a composite dependency specification including any unresolved source dependencies, and a merged provenance-lineage record preserving each source artifact's identity and proportional contribution. The composition event is recorded in the governance chain so that the derivation of the composite licensing specification from its sources remains traceable.
Certification Before Activation
A governed composition event produces a fresh certification record requiring sandbox evaluation per Section 8.5 of the composite prior to activation. The composite is not treated as pre-cleared on the strength of its sources having been certified. It is evaluated in a governance-credentialed sandboxed execution environment against representative generation contexts before it may be activated on a consuming agent's operational cognitive substrate.
Because the composite licensing specification is computed at composition time and carried as a field of the composite artifact, the licensing terms are available to the admissibility evaluation that governs activation and use, rather than reconstructed at each operation. The licensing specification participates in governed admissibility the same way the artifact's other fields do.
Composition Functions
The governed offline-merging mechanism computes merged adaptation content from a plurality of source artifacts through any of a plurality of merging functions, including without limitation weight-arithmetic merging (addition, interpolation, spherical interpolation, and weighted-sum combination), task-arithmetic merging (task vectors added, subtracted, or scaled), TIES merging (task-interference-elimination resolving parameter conflicts), DARE merging (drop-and-rescale techniques reducing interference), subspace merging, attention-head-wise merging, layer-wise merging, learned merging that is itself governance-policy-bound and machine-learned, and composite merging combining two or more of the foregoing.
The composite licensing intersection applies uniformly across these merging functions. Whatever function produces the merged adaptation content, the resulting composite carries the most-restrictive intersection of the source licensing specifications. The merging function determines how parameters combine; it does not relax the licensing terms that the sources impose.
Composition With Other Primitives
Composite licensing intersection composes with the spatial-adaptation primitives of the parent provisional. As artifacts specialized for local conditions are composed with one another or with general artifacts, each composition event recomputes the composite licensing specification from the then-current source specifications and records the result in the governance chain.
Composition with cross-model portability allows an artifact to be retargeted from one base cognitive substrate to a structurally compatible second substrate; the licensing specification travels with the artifact and is preserved across the portability event through the portability-lineage record. Composition with the dependency mechanism ensures that an artifact is admitted only when its prerequisite artifacts are available, certified, compatible, and licensed prior to activation of the dependent artifact.
The composite, like every governed mutation in the architecture, closes into the five-property governance chain: authority-credentialed observation, evidential weighting in the shared observation store, composite admissibility evaluation across the cognitive-domain fields, governed actuator execution, and lineage-recorded provenance. The composite licensing specification enters that chain as a field subject to admissibility evaluation, and its derivation from the source specifications is recorded in lineage.
Worked Example
Consider two source adaptation artifacts combined into a single merged artifact for deployment. The first source carries a licensing specification permitting activation and composition with attribution. The second source carries a stricter licensing specification permitting activation but restricting further redistribution. The governed composition event produces a composite artifact whose composite licensing specification is the most restrictive intersection of the two: the composite may be activated, but it inherits the redistribution restriction of the stricter source. The composite also receives a fresh certification record and must pass sandbox evaluation per Section 8.5 before it may be activated on the consuming agent's operational substrate.
The composition is recorded in the governance chain with each source artifact's identity and proportional contribution preserved in the merged provenance-lineage record, so the derivation of the composite's licensing terms from its sources remains traceable.
Disclosure Scope
This disclosure supports claims directed to: a method in which a governed composition event combining a plurality of source adaptation artifacts produces a governance-chain-preserving composite artifact inheriting a composite licensing specification equal to the most restrictive intersection of the source licensing specifications; a system in which the composite further inherits a composite authority credential, a composite capability scope, a composite dependency specification, and a merged provenance-lineage record; a method in which the composite receives a fresh certification record requiring sandbox evaluation prior to activation; and corresponding non-transitory computer-readable media bearing instructions implementing the foregoing. The disclosure further supports dependent claims directed to the plurality of merging functions through which the merged adaptation content is computed and to composition with cross-model portability and dependency primitives. This disclosure is supported by U.S. Provisional Application No. 64/049,409.
