Build a machine that accepts a release and reports a count.
You build the machine. We hold the registry of named ways of working, the release path that carries one to controls you have already built, and the count that meters the hours it runs. What you ship carries skill your buyer can name, and provenance their counsel can read.
Two obligations on your side. A short list on ours.
There is no integration program here and no joint development. There is one written specification. A machine meets it or it does not, and the terms are the same either way.
A machine that accepts a release and reports a count
A release is a sealed package a named person signed for, built for the controls that machine already has, and refusable on inspection. Your machine takes it, or declines it and says why.
A count is one signed row, written where the work happens, recording the hours a named way of working actually ran. The act that clears the machine to run is the act that starts the meter.
Nothing else is asked of you. We do not ask for a change to your controls, your hydraulics or your safety system, and we do not ask for a feed of anything.
Skill you can ship on, with a name attached to it
Every hour a machine of yours runs under a licensed way of working is attributable to the person it came from, consented at the moment it was recorded, and endable by them.
That chain is readable from the outside. Your buyer's counsel can follow it from the seat it started in to the row you invoice against, and check each step against a record rather than against our description of one.
You are shipping a capability whose origin has a name on it, and that is a difference a procurement file can hold.
One specification, offered on the same terms to every party that builds against it.
Including the machine company inside our own group. That company reads the document you read, on the day you read it, under the terms you hold.
There is one document, so there is nothing to hold back. A specification a related party receives first is not a specification. It is an advantage with a specification's name on it.
Where a change affects what a machine must do, it is issued to everyone building against the interface at the same time, in the same words. There is no private extension, no early sight, and no term available to one builder that is not available to the next. A maker who competes with the machine company in our group builds against exactly what that company builds against.
- One document, and the same one for every party.
- The same terms to a party that competes with us as to a party that licenses from us.
- Changes issued to everyone at once, never negotiated party by party.
- No build of the interface that exists for one company and not another.
Test that rather than take it: the specification is available under NDA, and the terms it is offered on are the same ones every other party holds. Tell us what you build.
The boundary is drawn in the specification, not in a policy.
A machine never receives a session. It receives a release, and it returns a count. Everything else stays on the far side of the line, and the line is written into the thing you build against rather than into a commitment we make beside it.
Fig. 1 — Across the interface. Sealed objects carry a mark; dashed rules are boundaries information does not cross.
A release carries a digest of what went into it and never the contents. That is enough for your machine to satisfy itself that the package in front of it is the package that was signed for, and it is not enough to reconstruct anything about the person who made the work.
A released package is fixed. It does not learn in the field.
This is a design decision taken against a named legal risk, and a maker's counsel will see it immediately.
Directive (EU) 2024/2853 applies from 9 December 2026, and applies to products placed on the market after that date. A physical machine is unambiguously a product. Under Article 4(18), read with Recital 40, a substantial modification can arise from the continuous learning of an AI system. Where it does, the modified product is treated as newly placed on the market at the moment the modification is made, the party that made the modification is a manufacturer in its own right under Article 8(2), and the ten-year clock in Article 17(1)(b) starts again.
Continuous learning can constitute a substantial modification, and only where the two-part test is met. It is untested. No judgment anywhere has addressed whether routine incremental refinement crosses the threshold. That is a fact about the state of the law, not a caution about this company.
We took the decision that does not depend on how the question is answered. A released package is fixed at the moment it is built. It does not adapt on your machine, and it is not a different thing at the end of a shift than it was at the start. A different way of working reaching your machine is a different package, chosen by name, by a person, before the work starts. If a court one day reads Article 4(18) at its widest, nothing that left here has been modifying itself in your customer's yard.
A skill does not change on a machine without a person putting it there.
No part of your safety case rests on anything we supply.
We are not a designer, manufacturer, integrator or supplier of any machine or any driver. We say it plainly here, because it is the first question your counsel will ask and the answer should not take a meeting.
We do not design your controls, build them, put them together on a machine, or supply the thing that moves. Your machine is your machine, your conformity work is yours, and your safety case is yours end to end. Nothing in a licence from us changes that, and nothing in a licence from us belongs in it.
The ordering that follows from this is the same ordering the rest of the site describes, and it is absolute. A package proposes. A person on the crew authorizes, choosing a named way of working before the work starts — there is no default and no last-used, because a machine carrying yesterday's choice forward would be running on nobody's authority. Your safety system sits above both. If it refuses, the work does not happen, and nothing in the release path can talk it out of that. The veto is yours to build and yours to keep.
- Designer
- YouWe design no part of any machine
- Manufacturer
- YouWe build no part of any machine
- Integrator
- YouWe put nothing together on a machine
- The driver
- You or your supplierWe supply no driver
- The safety case
- Yours, end to endNothing we supply forms a part of it
- The count
- Signed at your machineOne row clears it and starts the meter
What we stand behind is a short list and we publish it as one: the money owed, the count, and the deletion. Never the machine, never the job, never the output.
A person can stop, and you price your business accordingly.
This is the term a buyer resents learning late, so it is on the page rather than in a schedule.
Every way of working in the registry is held under a licence the person it came from can end, freely, on their own say, effective on receipt, needing nobody's agreement. When they end it, the timing is exact and neither we nor you can extend it.
A skill stops for new work at once. No new job starts under it from the day the notice arrives. A job already running finishes, because stopping a machine mid-pass is its own hazard, and that is the one delay in it. A person is told two dates and never one: the out-of-service date, the day the skill stops being choosable, and the true date, the day the last copy is gone with the backups. The shorter is never allowed to stand in for the longer.
Commercially, the part to take away is this. A withdrawal is never a breach by us, is never a failure of supply, and gives you no claim of any kind. It is not an exception; it is the mechanism working the way it is described. Build your machine so that losing a named way of working is an ordinary event — the machine returns to its own operator's way of working, which never left — and set your commitments to your own customers on that basis. The full timing is on withdrawal.
Building a machine that should account for the skill it runs?
Tell us what you build and what it runs on. The specification is available under NDA.