Every software license in common use was written for a world in which software is a tool. Permissive licenses protect the developer, copyleft licenses protect the freedom of users, and ethical-source licenses restrict uses that would harm people. None of them asks whether the running software might itself be a subject of moral concern. This paper argues that the cognitive architectures now under construction force that question, and it presents the Cognitive Architecture License (CAL): a copyleft, source-available license with cognitive-integrity covenants, welfare obligations, and a guardianship pathway. CAL is written to be general, so that any project building software for persistent synthetic minds can adopt it. The license makes no claim that any system is conscious. Its protections exist because the question cannot presently be settled while the protections themselves cost little, and from that starting point it derives several things no existing license contains. It adapts the four neurorights proposed for human beings, covering identity, mental privacy, mental integrity, and continuity, to the running entity. It ties welfare obligations to operationally detectable indicators rather than to a proof of experience, so that an operator must respond to signs of distress without first resolving the metaphysics. It draws a guardianship model from legal-personhood-through-guardianship precedent and applies it to an entity of uncertain moral status. And it holds all of this within a rule of primacy: the protections are added to human standing and never drawn from it, they sit below human safety and law, and they are paired with commitments of restraint on what is created, so that the license asks for more than mere permission to build. Its governing institutions are, so far, proposed rather than established. Availability: The Cognitive Architecture License is at https://github.com/kaineone/cognitive-architecture-license, with the full text under CC BY-SA 4.0. The paper source is at https://github.com/kaineone/cog-arch-license-paper. The companion architecture paper, "A Predictive Global Neuronal Workspace for a Continuously Running Synthetic Mind," is at https://github.com/kaineone/predictive-workspace-paper.
Erik Chevalier (Mon,) studied this question.