AI Commons Commitments (AICC), a licence framework for AI deployments: a record of the project's research at CLEA, 2025-2026.
AICC was a research project of the Center Leo Apostel for Interdisciplinary Studies (CLEA) at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, led by Em Lenartowicz. It set out to design a licence framework through which the systemic effects of the AI transition could be shaped from within the economy that produces them, by the parties to AI's own value chains. Between its first papers in 2025 and November 2026 the project produced a series of publications, a draft standard, and an international Working Group hosted at CLEA.
In November 2026 the framework moved to AI Commons, where it continues as Deployment Commitments.
A systems reading of the AI transition
The effects of the AI transition that weigh most on society - the concentration of its gains, the costs it displaces onto people and places outside the deployment, the opacity of its operations - are properties of the AI economy as a whole. They emerge from the interaction of a very large number of deployments, each an arrangement through which some organisation puts an AI capability to work, and they are decided nowhere.
Each deployment draws what it needs into a boundary of its own and settles its arrangements with its suppliers and its users with its own operation in view. These arrangements are where AI capability meets the economy. The pattern they produce together is settled by none of them and answered by all of them, continuously, as the aggregate of private decisions that are each rational on their own terms. What each arrangement leaves unsaid allocates as firmly as what it says.
The interventions that dominate AI governance act elsewhere. The design of models shapes the components, and regulation draws boundaries around what the components may do. Both matter, but a well-designed system operating within the law can still feed an outcome that harms the whole, because the outcome is produced in the relations between deployments, at a pace that AI sets: capabilities spread across a sector within months, and the terms on which they spread entrench as quickly.
In a self-organising system, a pattern of this kind is an attractor: many uncoordinated decisions keep reproducing it, and no single decision can leave it. What moves an attractor is a change in the local rules the parts follow, once the new rule is easy to adopt, legible to others, and passed on through the connections between parts. Creative Commons and open-source licensing changed whole sectors in this way, through a few standard sets of terms that individual creators chose and that, in the case of copyleft, every recipient carried further.
AICC was designed as such a rule for the AI economy. Its standard licence terms attach to a deployment, where the pattern is generated, and a deployment that adopts them can require them of the deployments that supply it and of those that build on it. Commitments then travel along value chains, from one connection to the next, so that a choice made in one deployment can reach the scale of the system.
The Working Group at CLEA
Em Lenartowicz (Chair), Cristian Axenie, Michel Bauwens, Ann Borda, Steve Coy, Scott L. David, Vasilis Kostakis, Francesca Larosa, Fatima Roumate, Andrzej Ryś, Joana Santos, Mihaela Ulieru, Weaver D.R. Weinbaum, Young Yoon, Gen Zendahl.
References
Bauwens, M., & Niaros, V. (2017). Value in the Commons Economy: Developments in Open and Contributory Value Accounting. P2P Foundation. Berlin: Heinrich Böll Foundation. URL
Borda, A., & Tzovaras, B. G. (2026). AI and Collective Data Governance in Crowdsourced Citizen Science: A Normative Framework Approach. Harvard Data Science Review. DOI
Kostakis, V., & Tympas, A. (2025). AI as commons: Why we need community-controlled Artificial Intelligence. Internet Policy Review. URL
Lenartowicz, E. M. (2025). Impact-Oriented Licensing for Artificial Intelligence: A Conceptual Framework for a New Domain of AI Governance. SSRN. DOI
Lenartowicz, E. M. (2025). Shaping AI Impacts Through Licensing: Illustrative Scenarios for the Design Space. SSRN. DOI
Lenartowicz, E. M. (2025). AI Commons (AIC) Licence Suite: A Modular Framework for Impact-Oriented AI Governance. SSRN. DOI
Lenartowicz, E. M. (2026). Universal Basic Income: A Global Puzzle. In M. Rangeley, D. Lacalle, S. Kamall, & J. Van Overtveldt (Eds.), The Future of Money. Springer Nature. Pre-print: SSRN
Lenartowicz, E. M. (2026). The AI Commons Framework: Private Ordering as Systemic Co-Regulation Across AI Value Chains. Law, AI and Regulation Conference (LAIR 2026), Erasmus University Rotterdam, 11-12 June 2026. SSRN
Lenartowicz, E. M. (forthcoming). Licensing AI as societal infrastructure: Deployment commitments for impact-oriented governance. Internet Policy Review.
Governing the Systemic Impacts of AI Where Regulation Doesn't Reach: Standardised Commitments and Lateral Requirements across Value Chains. Presentation of the AICC Framework, WSIS Forum 2026, Session 337, ITU, Geneva, 6 July 2026. Session · Recording (ITU webcast)