What you're licensing
Before anything else, be precise about what you want. The LEF Engine is not one product. It is a portfolio of distinct, interlocking assets. Different assets have different terms. Conflating them creates confusion that tends to collapse deals that should have worked.
The substrate
Not licensable, not for sale. The LEF Ai meta-engine, the patent portfolio, the calibration corpus, and the running DCFN engine builds themselves (DCFN-Patents, DCFN-Research, DCFN-Bio, future DCFN-X) are the intellectual property of Living Eden Frameworks LLC. The substrate is what powers every deployment. It is not available for outright sale, acquisition, transfer, or sublicensing under any of the routes below.
Deployment surfaces
Licensable via the routes below. What customers can license is the operation of named deployments within defined fields of use, delivered as Private Enclave deployments. The license grants the right to use; it does not grant the underlying engine.
Inquiries framed as "acquire the engine," "purchase DCFN-Patents," or "transfer the LEF Ai substrate" are declined by default. The substrate stays with Living Eden Frameworks LLC; only the routes below grant rights to operate on top of it.
Before any licensing or partnership discussion, both sides sign a mutual NDA, published openly and DocuSign-able.
How to license
Three ways to engage, by commitment. Every field license is delivered sealed inside your own confidential-compute environment (the Secure Enclave, below); Try It to evaluate the engine directly first, then license a field, non-exclusively, or exclusively to lock competitors out of it.
Try It. See what the engine produces before licensing a field. Each build offers a Request to Try: tell us what you'd run, and on a fit we send a Try-It code worth 3 runs per month, on the house. No commitment.
Secure Enclave: the engine in your own environment
The substrate runs sealed inside your own confidential-compute environment (a Trusted Execution Environment), so neither your DevOps team nor the cloud provider can read it during execution. It begins with a mandatory paid Data Readiness Assessment and a partner-specific connector, under the Three-Layer IP structure; bring-your-own-AI applies.
- For organizations whose data cannot leave their own environment.
- Available under either field license; pricing is set to scope in conversation.
- Optional bring-your-own-corpus: the engine traverses whatever graph your enclave exposes (e.g. international patent families, non-patent literature, or a dataset you already license).
Full terms: Enclave Deployment standard terms · Non-Exclusive Field License agreement · Exclusive Field License agreement · Brand Display Addendum (Schedule B).
Non-Exclusive Field License Active
You receive the right to deploy the LEF Engine, or a specific deployment such as DCFN, within a defined field of use. Living Eden Frameworks retains ownership of all patents, the calibration corpus, and all other deployments. You are not the only licensee — other parties may hold licenses in different fields at the same time.
What this looks like in practice
- A research platform licenses DCFN for use in its scholarly discovery product.
- An academic publisher licenses the CTE framework for structural gap detection in its editorial workflow.
- A government technology integrator licenses LEF ISB for a specific state contract.
- A materials R&D firm licenses DCFN-Materials for use in its internal discovery pipeline.
Why this route
Non-exclusive licensing preserves optionality. Multiple narrowly scoped non-exclusive licenses across different markets create more long-term value than a single broad exclusive arrangement.
How it's structured
A one-time field-license fee plus a flat annual — no royalty. Because the license is non-exclusive, it is priced below an exclusive: you are paying for the right to operate in your field, not to foreclose the market. Scope and figures are set to your field of use, in conversation.
Typical terms
- One-time field-license fee plus a flat annual; no running royalty.
- Field of use defined narrowly and precisely.
- No right to sublicense.
- No right to assign without consent.
- Perpetual license back to Living Eden Frameworks for any improvements the licensee makes to the engine.
Start a conversation: sales@livingedenframeworks.com
Exclusive Field License Active
You receive an exclusive license to operate within a defined field of use — within that field, Living Eden Frameworks grants no competing license, so your competitors are locked out of the capability there. Exclusivity is always scoped to a field; it is never blanket.
This route is for a strategic player who wants the capability and the foreclosure of their competitors within their market — a party that already understands what the engine does because it is building toward it.
How it's structured
Because we do not take a royalty, an exclusive is structured as a larger one-time exclusivity fee plus a smaller flat annual. The upfront prices the foreclosure — taking the capability off the market in your field and keeping your competitors out. The flat annual maintains the exclusivity: it keeps the exclusive right live, and if it lapses, exclusivity reverts to non-exclusive. Figures are set to scope, in conversation.
Scope guardrails (non-negotiable)
- Exclusivity is bounded to a defined field of use. No exclusive is granted broad enough to block Living Eden Frameworks from operating the substrate or any other DCFN-x deployment in other fields or markets.
- No interest in the substrate, the patent portfolio, the calibration corpus, or a self-hostable engine build is conveyed — only the exclusive right to operate within the field.
- Perpetual, royalty-free license back to Living Eden Frameworks for any improvements the licensee makes, for use outside the licensee's field.
- Non-payment of the annual reverts the license to non-exclusive.
Start a conversation: sales@livingedenframeworks.com
Not sure which route fits? Start at licensing@livingedenframeworks.com.
Routes Living Eden Frameworks will not accept
These are not negotiating positions. They are architectural constraints. Agreements that violate them will not be signed regardless of the number on the table.
- Outright sale, acquisition, or transfer of the engine substrate. This applies across the LEF Ai meta-engine, the patent portfolio, the calibration corpus, and the running engine builds powering every DCFN deployment and any future DCFN-x. The substrate is not for sale at any price.
- Exclusive license broad enough to block other deployments. No license will be granted that prevents Living Eden Frameworks from operating the LEF Ai substrate or any DCFN-x deployment in other markets or fields of use.
- Calibration corpus transfer by default. The calibration corpus is not included in any software or patent license by default and must be negotiated separately if ever included.
- Sublicensing rights. No licensee receives the right to sublicense the engine or any component of it to a third party.
- Any license that imposes confidentiality on the existence of the relationship. Financial terms may be confidential; the existence of the relationship itself may not be hidden.
- Patent assignment of individual filings detached from the arc. The provisional stack is structurally interdependent; individual assignment detached from the full arc is not acceptable.
What any license must include
Regardless of route, every license agreement must include the following:
- Perpetual license back. Any improvements, adaptations, or derivative works the licensee makes to the engine or its components must include a perpetual, royalty-free, non-exclusive license back to Living Eden Frameworks for use outside the licensee's field of use.
- Transparency requirement. Products built on the engine must disclose that structural intelligence is powered by patented technology. Brand attribution to LEF and the specific deployment remains required on generated outputs regardless of route or tier.
- Human-in-the-loop commitment. No licensee may configure the engine to apply its recommendations automatically without human review.
- Service availability posture. Living Eden Frameworks does not silently substitute lower-capability AI substrates, simpler heuristics, or partial outputs during upstream outages. Failed runs do not count against run pools.
- Compliance verification. Living Eden Frameworks retains the right to verify the licensee's use against the field-of-use definition and the terms of the license, no more than once per year. For LEF-hosted routes this is a standard use audit on 30 days notice. For a confidential-enclave (Secure Enclave) deployment — where the engine runs sealed inside the partner's environment and LEF cannot inspect it — verification is satisfied by a written compliance certification on request; publicly observable obligations (brand display, roster) remain directly verifiable.
- Patent prosecution cooperation. During pending patent prosecution, the licensee agrees to cooperate with Living Eden Frameworks on third-party inquiries related to the licensed patents arising from the licensee's use.
- Full supplemental claim acknowledgment. Any license involving DCFN-x, LEF-x, or any other deployment must expressly acknowledge the claim scope of U.S. Provisional 64/043,294, 64/045,185, 64/061,710, and 64/061,715 as part of the patent stack protecting the licensed surface.