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I wanted to try to reproduce the research results (https://github.com/statewright/statewright#research-results) locally but I wasn't able to find the code for it, have you publish the code for running those somewhere?

The research page (https://statewright.ai/research) mentions a patent, and a "core engine";

> Provisional patent application filed: #64/054,240 (April 30, 2026). 35 claims covering state machine guardrail enforcement for LLM agent tool access. The core engine remains Apache 2.0 open source.

I'm not sure I understand what the "core engine" is if it's not the "state machine guardrail runtime" which is what the patent cover. What parts are the open source parts exactly?

I find the idea really interesting and was nodding along the way as I read what you wrote, makes sense both for the human and the agent, seems like a really nice idea that'd help, but the patent kind of makes me want to run away and not look into it too deeply.

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Thanks for digging deeper and I'm happy to clarify all three aspects:

Re: Reproducing the results: the engine, agent crate and demo TUI are all in the repo. If you have ollama running with a 13B+ model, task run:bugfix reproduces the simple bugfix result end to end. What isn't published yet is the SWE-bench experiment harness (task selection, patch scoring, control runs). I need to get that out, I prioritized the end-to-end simple Claude Code plugin for the launch. The demo crate (crates/demo) contains a demo TUI which calls ollama and runs the bugfix state machine interactively with code.

Re: Engine: The core engine (crates/engine/) is the pure Rust state machine evaluator. It's what Statewright is running on the backend. JSON in => transition decisions out. Agent (crates/agent/) builds on top of it to make it useful for LLMs. That all is Apache 2.0 with no restrictions.

Re: the Patent: The patent covers the method of using state machines to constrain LLM agent tool access at the protocol layer. It's defensive, it helps protect the managed service and the idea from "being scooped" from a larger company with more personnel and resources. It's not targeted against solo developers, self-hosters or researchers.

You'll find that the portions that I've released FSL 1.1 have explicit grants which do not restrict solo developers or single team self-hosting. The code released this way becomes Apache 2 in exactly 3 years. This is not unlike what Sentry and MariaDB did. I am planning on releasing more portions as FSL 1.1, I just hadn't crossed that bridge and honestly this thing seems to have gotten popular at the moment so I thought I'd set the record straight a bit

It sounds to me like the interesting parts then are under the patents, and the non-essential parts are effectively what you've open sourced here.

I understand the concern and why you'd want to do something like this, but I hope you also understand from the other side that it makes it a no-go to even continue reading about.

> It's not targeted against solo developers, self-hosters or researchers.

If this is so, you might want to add an actual exclusion to the patents/licenses for those groups of people, if that's how you feel about it. Right now, they're kind of "empty words", and I probably couldn't defend myself in court if you sue me with "But they said on HN they wouldn't target me", but I'm not a lawyer, nor am I interested in paying a lawyer to figure this out either.

> The code released this way becomes Apache 2 in exactly 3 years.

I suppose I'll put a reminder to look into this project again in exactly 3 years! :) Regardless, I do wish you luck, the idea still seems solid in theory, so eagerly awaiting the future open source release.

> you might want to add an actual exclusion to the patents/licenses for those groups of people

Done :) https://github.com/statewright/statewright/blob/main/PATENTS...

Thank you for calling my attention to this. I think the world would be a better place if everyone just left the lawyers out of everything

The not-quite-Apache-2 "Fair Source License, Version 1.1, ALv2 Future License" (https://github.com/getsentry/fsl.software/blob/main/FSL-1.1-...) includes the Apache 2 patent grant. That grants you conditional permission to use the software in ways that would, without the grant, infringe upon their patent. One of the conditions is that you may not make a claim against any party that the software infringes upon any patent, or else your patent grant is terminated.

Unfortunately, the license actually in the repo is not even a not-quite-Apache-2 license. It doesn't appear to be FSL-1.1-ALv2 at all: https://github.com/statewright/statewright/blob/main/plugins.... This notably does not include the patent grant, which makes it unclear whether use of the software would infringe upon the patent.

You're right, and I have just corrected this. The license in the repo now uses the canonical FSL-1.1-ALv2 based on the template from fsl.software and now includes the patent grant clause.

The omission wasn't intentional -- the patent grant wasn't on my radar when the original license text was committed. FSL licensing is very new territory for me and I duffed it slightly, now corrected.

That's odd, Cargo.toml says license is Apache 2

https://github.com/statewright/statewright/blob/main/Cargo.t...

Is that wrong?

the Cargo.toml covers the built Rust crates (engine, agent). the plugins/ directory has it's own LICENSE.md with the FSL terms. split license: the engine is completely open source, plugins FSL with a 3 year clock. I should make this clearer in the workspace config. I am planning on releasing more of the crates, they will likely be FSL and each of those crates will have a LICENSE.md override. I think this is the canonical pattern but anyone please correct me

update: I released the of the crates (with the exception of the gateway as FSL) as Apache 2.0 today (and uploaded to crates.io) along with a UI piece that's Apache 2.0 as well.

You should be able to run self-hosted end-to-end with docker-compose, let me know with a GitHub issue if something isn't working in that regard

I also just updated the https://statewright.ai/research page to accurately reflect the intent and mention the patent grant afforded under FSL-1.1-ALv2. Thanks again for calling my attention to this.

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