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DEPA AI Chain: Empowerment Through Provenance

The DEPA AI Chain is central to operationalising data sharing for AI development and runtime use, while preserving privacy and maintaining verifiable provenance across the entire AI lifecycle — spanning dataset creation and licensing through training, release, inference, and content distribution. Risks and returns are managed through contracts and programmable controls; oversight is delivered via transparency logs and lightweight audits by a self-regulatory organisation (SRO), yielding an efficient and effective supervisory mechanism.

1.0 Unpacking Provenance

Provenance, in digital systems, refers to the systematic tracking of the origin of data and the complete history of the transformations and processes it undergoes throughout its lifecycle. It captures metadata about where the data came from, how it was created, and how it has been modified, combined, or interpreted over time.

Data provenance plays a critical role across a wide range of applications and scenarios. It is essential for ensuring the reproducibility of scientific experiments and computational workflows, enabling others to independently validate results. It supports fault diagnosis and fault tolerance by providing a traceable record that helps isolate and correct errors in complex systems. Provenance is also key to explainability (but also vastly different), as it clarifies how specific outcomes or decisions were derived, particularly in contexts such as AI and automated decision-making. In addition, provenance provides vital support for forensic investigations and auditing, where establishing the trustworthiness and integrity of data is crucial for compliance, accountability, and legal defensibility. By making the history of data transparent and verifiable, provenance serves as a foundational element of trustworthy digital systems.

In the context of personal data sharing, consent without provenance is an unauditable promise. There is a need to include a machine-readable trail linking consent or data protection compliance (the promise) to verifiable facts. 

The concept of provenance is increasingly critical in the context of modern AI systems, which are pervasive across numerous domains. In such systems — often characterised by Markovian or black-box behaviours — establishing clear causal relationships between inputs and outputs is inherently challenging. The opacity of many AI models, particularly deep learning models, makes it difficult to trace how specific outcomes arise, raising significant concerns around trust, accountability, and reproducibility.

Although parallel efforts exist under the banners of Explainable AI (XAI) and Trustworthy AI (TAI), provenance offers a complementary and, in many cases, more scalable and cost-effective approach to enhancing transparency. When thoughtfully designed and integrated into AI pipelines, provenance can provide a systematic, audit-friendly mechanism to capture the lineage and transformations of data and models, often with fewer assumptions than model-specific explainability techniques.

At its core, provenance in AI systems addresses concerns such as: (i) authenticity (of data and its origins), (ii) ownership, (iii) traceability, and (iv) (approximate) reproducibility. In contrast, frameworks such as TAI tend to emphasise aspects including (i) accuracy, (ii) fairness, (iii) explainability, and (iv) safety.

Yet, even with these clear distinctions, provenance is sometimes misframed in policy discussions. Treating any and all provenance artefacts as something that inevitably leads to identity disclosure is an error, one that conflates transparency with surveillance or identity tracking. As critics often put it in “Road to Perdition” terms, unfettered access to provenance data may indeed pose risks — but such access is not meant to be unfettered. It must come with safeguards, constrained by law and subject to due oversight. Framing the choice as either no provenance or dystopia ignores both context and the inevitability of provenance as part of the solution. Even references to Puttaswamy’s judgement, frequently invoked in this debate, are incomplete if not situated within its broader framework of proportionality and legitimate state aim. After all, without engaging with principles such as purpose limitation, retention bounds, or penalties for misuse, how else are systems meant to achieve reliability and harm reduction at scale? The answer lies not in abandoning provenance, but in advancing privacy-preserving provenance — mechanisms that preserve accountability and auditability without compromising individual rights.

1.1 Promise and Potential of AI Chain

The AI Chain is fundamentally a mechanism for capturing the lineage and transformations of data and models in a systematic, effective way, offering a complementary approach to XAI. The AI Chain promises to meet the following requirements:

  • Lineage: Lineage captures the complete journey of data and AI outputs—from consent and licensing, through training, to distribution—ensuring traceability, authenticity, and near-precise reproducibility of AI outcomes. It provides a granular record by assigning unique IDs to datasets and linking a Data Principal’s ID to their data and consent artefact, documenting how data is introduced, modified, combined, and interpreted. To preserve privacy, lineage can be applied to metadata rather than raw data. Cryptographic mechanisms such as hash chains and Merkle trees secure the integrity of the entire lineage.

  • Effective Verification and Its Impact on Liability Allocation: Verifiers can check provenance artefacts—including signatures, attestations, and log proofs—at scale. This may assist in liability and accountability allocation, since the responsibilities of Training Data Providers, Training Data Consumers, publishers, and platforms are clearly stated through policies and contracts, and their actions are immutably recorded in provenance artefacts.

Finally, this approach has second-order effects on data quality: established provenance artefacts increase the value of well-curated datasets.

1.2 What AI Chain Is Not Intended to Do

  • Truthfulness or correctness guarantees: The chain reveals who, what, when, and how a piece of content was created or modified—but it cannot confirm whether the content depicts reality.
  • Bias/fairness or safety adjudication: The chain records facts; value judgements belong to governance, post-facto audits, and external assessments.
  • Enforcement on off-chain actors: Entities falling outside the chain are not snapshotted and can ignore the guardrails.
  • Eliminate the need for legal process: The chain provides strong factual and indisputable evidence, not automatic verdicts.

We welcome feedback and suggestions from all stakeholders at [email protected]

Please note: The blog post is authored by Subodh Sharma, with inputs from Sunu Engineer and Raj Shekhar, all volunteers with iSPIRT.

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FAQs and Facts on Techno-Legal Regulation 2.0

This blog continues our discussion on the techno-legal regulation of artificial intelligence (AI), building on our original post from 03.09.25—with a focus on key outstanding issues that required in-depth consideration, alongside the responses and questions we received from stakeholders as of 12.09.25.

Question 1: Since technology is constantly evolving, wouldn’t relying on technology to enable regulation be a flawed approach?

No—what would be flawed is mandating the use of specific technologies for regulation. In fast-evolving domains like AI, rigid technological mandates risk becoming obsolete within a short time—both stifling innovation and undermining public safety. A fundamental insight from systems theory reinforces this: to regulate or control a system that operates at speed x, the regulatory system itself must react and adapt at comparable or greater speed.

AI is evolving at breakneck speed and our understanding of the associated risks and failure pathways remains incomplete. This inherent uncertainty calls for a regulatory framework that is both flexible and adaptive. The most effective way to achieve this is by combining technological agility with failure-related metrics, all governed under lightweight legal constraints and conditions. The techno-legal approach is designed precisely for this: it sets clear outcome-focused obligations for system developers and operators, without prescribing rigid technical solutions, while promoting continuous system monitoring and adaptability to emerging risks.

For example, instead of mandating a particular technique for privacy preservation in AI training, policymakers under the techno-legal approach mandate only the regulatory outcome—i.e., privacy preservation—allowing developers to implement the latest techniques, such as differential privacy or federated learning, to achieve it. As a result, regulation remains effective and adaptive in the face of advancing technology and emerging risks.

Question 2: Isn’t a techno-legal approach most suitable when the subject of regulation is clearly defined? If so, doesn’t AI’s rapidly evolving and non-deterministic nature make it a poor candidate for such regulation?

A precise definition of the regulatory subject is essential for traditional command-and-control regulation. This model relies on ex ante identification and enumeration of risks and corresponding mitigation measures, typically framed as detailed, positive obligations that regulatees must follow. Without a clear regulatory subject, risk assessments can be inaccurate, leading to over-regulation in some areas and under-regulation in others. Given AI’s rapidly evolving and non-deterministic nature, it is ill-suited for such rigid regulation.

In contrast, a techno-legal approach focuses on defining the regulatory outcome, rather than the precise subject of regulation. The regulator requires that the outcome—such as privacy preservation in AI training—be embedded into the technical design of any system that could affect it, without prescribing specific methods to achieve compliance. This removes the need for exhaustive risk enumeration upfront and avoids the pitfalls of narrowly defining the regulatory subject. By focusing on outcomes rather than rigid processes, techno-legal regulation enables continuous adaptability, making it uniquely well-suited to govern AI systems that are non-deterministic and continuously evolving in capability and complexity.

For example, Musical AI’s Rights Management Platform is a techno-legal solution that embeds the regulatory objective of copyright protection directly into the AI model development process. The platform achieves this by restricting training of music generation models to licensed content and integrating attribution technology that logs each output, linking it to the original artist or song. This ensures seamless copyright enforcement and fair revenue sharing. Crucially, the focus remains exclusively on the outcome, i.e.—safeguarding creators’ exclusive rights over the use and distribution of their works, as mandated by copyright laws globally. For such a techno-legal solution to function, the regulator need not define specific AI model types for music generation as the regulatory subject, nor prescribe a particular rights management platform as a compliance mandate. Instead, technologists and companies remain free to innovate in AI music generation, applying any method or architecture they choose—as long as the regulatory outcome of effective copyright protection is achieved.

Question 3: How can techno-legal regulation be designed to avoid becoming redundant or leading to unintended or undesirable consequences?

Techno-legal approaches are intended to tackle the very problem of redundancy in AI regulation, setting clear, outcome-focused obligations for system developers and operators while enabling continuous monitoring and adaptability to emerging risks (as explained in response to Question 1 above).

That said, in addition to having clearly defined regulatory outcomes, techno-legal regulation depends on two key conditions to remain effective and adaptive, ensuring it does not ironically render itself redundant. First, the efficacy of any techno-legal solution must be assessed using well-defined metrics to track its progress toward the regulatory objective. Where direct measurement is impractical, appropriate proxy indicators can be used. Importantly, these metrics should be subject to regular review, ensuring they stay relevant and responsive to emerging externalities and shifts in the operating environment. Second, the techno-legal solution should undergo regular audits to verify its effectiveness and continued alignment with the regulatory objective. This ensures that the system continues to function as intended. When designed with clear objectives, measurable metrics, and periodic auditing—techno-legal regulation remains robust, avoiding potential redundancy and the risk of unintended or undesirable consequences.

Question 4: Wouldn’t the AI Chain architecture under DEPA 2.0 restrict the diversity of relationships in the value chain, thereby limiting novel pathways for innovation?

On the contrary, the AI Chain architecture is specifically designed to enable the broadest diversity of relationships in the AI value chain. Its open, modular design and transparent accountability mechanisms allow various actors—including developers, data providers, service operators, and others—to collaborate with trust and innovate without rigid barriers. This flexibility, in turn, fosters the emergence of novel and unexpected pathways for value creation.

Question 5: Can the allocation of liability—an inherently nuanced area of jurisprudence that has evolved over centuries—be effectively codified into a technology framework?

The allocation of liability, grounded in centuries of jurisprudence, becomes particularly complex when applied to AI. While techno-legal approaches may not be suited to directly assign liability and enforce penalties for AI harms on their own, they could certainly provide valuable tools to help navigate this complexity. For example, the AI Chain architecture under DEPA 2.0 leverages distributed ledger technology to provide end-to-end tracking of system activities and participant actions at a fine-grained level—capturing who performed which action, when, and using which model or dataset, with precise timestamps. Cryptographic proofs such as Merkle trees ensure that every step is irrefutably recorded and immutable. These detailed traces create a tamper-proof, transparent record of events, which auditors, courts, and regulators can use to reconstruct the sequence of actions leading to an AI-related harm.

The technological observability and causal traceability enabled by the architecture could incentivise good behaviour among ecosystem actors, reduce ambiguity in legal and adjudicatory processes, and support the development of robust AI liability jurisprudence—making liability allocation for AI harms streamlined, scalable, transparent, and fair.

We welcome feedback and suggestions from all stakeholders at [email protected]

Please note: The blog post is authored by Raj Shekhar, with inputs from Sunu Engineer and review by Subodh Sharma, all volunteers with iSPIRT.

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FAQs and Facts on Techno-Legal Regulation

This blog is an invitation to advance public discourse on techno-legal regulation of artificial intelligence (AI). It builds on an article by Rahul Matthan (15 January 2025), in which he raised reservations about applying techno-legal regulation to AI governance and expressed concerns about the practicability of techno-legal artefacts-particularly their ability to establish liability chains among ecosystem actors-as a tool for enforcing good behaviour and ensuring accountability for AI harms. Through a Q&A format, this blog addresses those reservations and concerns directly, while explaining why techno-legal regulation is not only feasible but also the only practicable and scalable way to regulate AI effectively

Techno-legal regulation isn’t a monolithic concept, it can assume multiple implementations for different problems. DEPA Training embeds privacy and sovereignty requirements directly into AI training pipelines through confidential clean rooms and differential privacy. DEPA Inference creates consent-based data sharing. The proposed AI Chain architecture would establish liability tracking through distributed ledgers. Each solves a different problem using the same core principle: making regulatory compliance systematically enforced rather than legally suggested.

The confusion arises because people conflate these distinct systems. DEPA Training ensures AI models can do data collaboration. Privacy budgets will prevent individual contributions from being traced. DEPA Inference ensures PII based data can’t be accessed without consent because the cryptographic handshake fails without a valid consent artifact. AI Chain would ensure accountability can’t be avoided because every inference generates a log trace. Three different problems, three different techno-legal solutions, one underlying philosophy: architecture enforces what law requires.

Moreover, tools don’t meet the bar of techno-legal: that is precisely why one would want to craft techno-legal docs to accept technology substrates as keys ideas which are accepted and acknowledged as such to be mechanisable to meet certain key properties and invariants (in the real world). Tools are just instances of realising these mechanisable properties/invariants. For instance — can policy be put as attestable and executable code — why not? Policy is a set of unambiguous rules and so long as they are unambiguous and computable, they are automatable. If exceptions to the rule exist then they must also be documented.

There is a general worry that introducing identities into AI systems will erode privacy. From a computer-systems standpoint, that conclusion doesn’t follow. What matters is how identifiers are created and managed and what is recorded. With pairwise (service-scoped) identifiers, selective disclosure, and tamper-evident logging of metadata (not payloads), systems can offer accountability and simultaneously uphold Privacy by Design (PbD). These are not speculative ideas: the web and major identity programs already run variants at scale.

OpenID Connect has long supported pairwise subject identifiers, which purposely give each relying party a different, opaque value, curbing cross-service linkability. Aadhaar’s Virtual ID (VID) and UID tokenization make the same design choice in India: a revocable, tokenized identifier is presented instead of the Aadhaar number, and per-agency tokens prevent easy correlation across services while remaining auditable. In both cases, the principle is the same—identity is scoped to a context.

On the web, the W3C Verifiable Credentials (VC) 2.0 model and cryptographic suites such as BBS+ allow a holder to prove only the claims that are necessary (for example, “over 18”) while withholding the rest; the SD-JWT work in the IETF ecosystem supports similar selective-disclosure for JWTs (JSON Web Tokens). The direction of travel — both in standards and deployments — is to treat “need-to-know” as a first-class property.

Every time a browser trusts a public TLS certificate, it relies on Certificate Transparency (CT) — append-only Merkle-tree logs with efficient inclusion and consistency proofs—to keep Certificate Authorities honest. Chrome and Apple have required CT for certificates issued after 2018. Therein lies a lesson for AI: append-only, publicly auditable logs are one mature way to record event receipts without exposing content.

PbD’s “positive-sum” stance is compatible with a metadata-only accountability layer. Instead of retaining prompts, outputs, or personal payloads, systems can emit signed, append-only receipts that capture who/what/which/when: a scoped user identifier, model and dataset versions, operation type (e.g., generate/transform/moderate), timestamp, and the responsible (but not necessarily trusted) operator or process. Auditors later verify that events occurred and in which order via Merkle proofs; when a lawful process requires more detail, selective-disclosure credentials release the minimum necessary information. This is the same architectural separation that keeps web PKI and identity wallets both auditable and privacy-preserving.

When we track things securely, we do not create a surveillance state. We create a modelable, measurable, manageable state. When the tracking data is misused by parties – parties in power or parties with power to access the data, bypassing access checks – then they have the ability to create a surveillance state or cause damage. DEPA liability chains are designed to establish the connections between different parts of the data economy ecosystem, but using strong cryptographic techniques to detect and protect against unauthorised access.

Traceability and agency/activity chains are needed to construct the data economy ecosystem robustly.

India needs techno-legal regulation because we can’t afford not to have it. We don’t have thousands of judges to adjudicate AI harm. We don’t have armies of auditors to verify compliance. We have scale challenges the West doesn’t face, governing AI for 1.4 billion people requires architectural enforcement. We need to protect our people and enable our innovators.

The question isn’t whether we need techno-legal regulation, it’s whether we’re honest about what happens without it. Without DEPA Training’s cryptographic enforcement, AI systems will train on unauthorized data because detection is impossible at scale. Without immutable audit trails, companies will claim compliance while violating every principle because verification requires resources we don’t have. Without architectural enforcement, the most vulnerable Indians, those who can’t afford lawyers, don’t understand technology, can’t navigate bureaucracy, will be harmed first and most.

AI space is an unknown space. To define legal regulation in a space we need to be able to enumerate ( exhaustively if possible) all the failure modes in the system and then frame the regulations to prevent, to detect, to curtail impact, to correct after the event etc. When we know the details one can compute the legal implications and consequences and define a legal regulation ( 80 percent) supported by technology ( 20 percent). When we are dealing with an unknown space, unknown in the sense that the failure modes are not enumerable, then we can do techno-legal regulation in an evolutionary manner ( even more so when the activity is distributed in space and time and occurring with a high frequency ). Here we start with a base implementation and evolve it based on the discovery of failure modes. We can argue that such an evolutionary approach to creating regulation that not only protects but also fosters growth needs to be implemented on a technology substrate (80 percent tech 20 percent human). Otherwise the evolution will be very slow and the regulation will be out of sync with market needs.

True, current technologies may not be able to solve use limitation and/or data minimisation in the world of AI ex-ante, however, the question should be can we construct testable tech mechanisms to check violations of these requirements ex-post. I believe that is certainly possible — challenging but doable.

DEPA does solve for this indirectly. Retention restrictions, usage limitation, data minimization, all require deep understanding of how and where data is being used. DEPA chains track and trace and provide this information which will enable the DEPA framework itself to implement and enforce these and other constraints and conditions on data use. Without a technology framework to do this, it is likely that there will be many more violations of these kinds of conditions without coming to light. The more complex the regulations get, the more technologically advanced and evolutionary the substrate needs to be.

We’re not encoding Platonic ideals of fairness, we’re implementing specific, measurable requirements that regulators and courts have already defined. DEPA Training’s architecture can use techno-legal solutions to enforce fairness principles, it may work like this: when a dataset enters the clean room, the system automatically computes demographic distributions and compares them against regulatory baselines. If biases are detected appropriate remedial measures are effected.

We welcome feedback and suggestions from all stakeholders at [email protected]

Please note: The blog post is authored by our volunteers, Sunu Engineer, Subodh Sharma, Raj Shekhar and Harshit Kacholiya