About this section

The following pages split the standard document into navigable sections. The full single-file source is spec/v1.0/standard.md in the monorepo. If the on-page prose ever diverges from the source file, the source file in the repo is authoritative.

Contents

1. Maturity levels — the five-level staged progression adapted from CMMI, with the 80% gating rule.
2. Pillars — the eight capability pillars that every criterion rolls up into.
3. Criteria catalog — the full v1.0 catalog of criteria. Versioned independently of the standard so additive updates can ship as catalog patch releases.
4. Assessment methodology — assessor types, determinism requirement, applicability marking, reassessment cadence.
5. Report format — the minimum fields every conformant report must carry.
6. Conformance claims — self-assessed vs third-party-verified claims, required disclosures, prohibited claims.
7. Governance (spec) — how the standard evolves, who owns it, how contributions are accepted.

Design principles (normative)

The standard is built on six principles. These apply to every criterion, every assessor, and every conformance claim:

1. Evidence is an artifact, not an attestation. Every criterion is satisfied by the presence, content, or configuration of a file, an API response, or a runtime signal — never by a written claim that a process is followed.
2. Machine-checkable by default. At least 80% of criteria MUST be expressible as deterministic checks. AI-assisted evaluation is permitted but not required.
3. Vendor-neutral. Nothing in the standard requires a specific agent, model provider, or tooling ecosystem.
4. Composable and extensible. Organizations MAY define additional domain-specific criteria without forking the standard.
5. Gated and comparable. A level is either achieved or not. There are no partial level scores.
6. Versioned and governed. Every conformance claim MUST reference the specific version it was assessed against.

License

The CARL Standard is proprietary to Wentzel.ai — all rights reserved. No open-source license grant is in effect today. You may read the standard for your own reference; copying, redistributing, or building derivative tooling from the spec text requires a separate written agreement with Wentzel.ai. See License for the current posture and the historical context on an earlier CC BY 4.0 + patent non-assertion plan that is not in effect today.