The Sovereign Memory Layer

Paper 5 of The Human Layer series. The durable, non-substitutable layer of an AI-native organization is the memory it owns and the judgment it can prove, not the model it rents. Compute and models are the rentable, replaceable, and increasingly withdrawable layer of the modern enterprise. The two assets an organization holds sovereign through vendor change, personnel change, and external disruption are its memory substrate and its accountable human judgment. These are the same asset seen from two sides: memory without accountable judgment is an archive, and judgment without memory is amnesia. This paper defines the Sovereign Memory Layer as the architecture that binds the two and makes both ownable, portable, and continuous. It argues that continuity is the strategic objective and memory the mechanism that delivers it; it introduces decision lineage, the ordered, append-only record of recommendation, action, delta, identity, and outcome, as the atomic unit of organizational memory and the genuinely novel category, distinct from the information storage, knowledge management, and audit logging it is routinely mistaken for; and it derives, rather than asserts, that memory has crossed from feature to infrastructure, by the test that the firm and the systems built upon it cannot function without it. The argument rests on three structural forces that predate any single event: model commoditization, the fragmentation crisis, and the concentration of dependence. It is grounded throughout in the regulatory and economic record, including the EU AI Act (Articles 12 and 14), ISO/IEC 42001, the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, the OECD AI Principles, the GDPR right to data portability, and the EU Data Act's switching regime. It keeps the human central throughout: memory does not replace judgment, it makes judgment continuous and provable. This is the capstone of The Human Layer series, published open access at ahmad.pt/research: Paper 1: The Human Layer (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19119699) Paper 2: The Human Layer Architecture (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19120077) Paper 3: The Human Layer Audit (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19453026) Paper 4: The Human Layer Economics (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20096569) Paper 5: The Sovereign Memory Layer (this record)