ACE K2 White Paper v1.2 – Current Capabilities Edition

ACE K2 is a governed autonomous local engineering factory designed to execute open-ended engineering goals using local AI models, tools and controlled supervisory escalation. It separates creative problem solving from authority, evidence, validation, provenance and acceptance controls. ACE K2 does not assume that the tools required to complete a goal already exist. It can identify missing capabilities, create or acquire them inside a governed sandbox, independently qualify them, and expose them for use only after controlled promotion. This Current Capabilities Edition documents the demonstrated production state of ACE K2. Demonstrated results include the 6/6 governed-autonomy core, autonomous KiCad engineering with 88/88 validation checks and zero ERC violations, an AMD-focused research and engineering project with 23/23 project checks and 10/10 regression checks, local web discovery with 26/26 checks, exact paged reconstruction of a 1.6 MB artifact, and long-run orchestration with 23/23 checks. The paper describes the current ACE architecture, authority boundaries, supervisory interaction, recovery and escalation behaviour, capability acquisition, evidence handling, validation and operational constraints. It presents the system as it exists at publication rather than as a development history. The demonstrated hardware baseline was Windows 11 Pro on an AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ 395 with Radeon 8060S and 128 GB unified memory, using a Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-GGUF local foreman. These are demonstrated test conditions and are not stated as minimum system requirements. Author: Nigel HutchinsonOrganisation: NH AppliedVersion: 1.2