What is the agency layer of the agentic internet?
The agency layer is where an organization stops being a website and becomes something a machine can act with: representation and execution — the charter that declares who its agents are, and the runtime they operate under. It is layers 6 and 7 of the nine-layer Web 4 map, the rung at which delegated authority becomes an action a counterparty can check.
Agency is delegated, not assumed
Agency is the capacity to act for someone, and on the old web an organization had none a machine could use: its authority lived in signatures, portals and phone calls. The agency layer is the part of the Web 4 stack that makes that capacity legible — a published charter that names an organization’s agents and what each role may do, and an execution runtime that carries those declarations into governed action.
Below it, identity says who an agent is and the graph says what exists; above it, settlement moves the value the action produces. The agency layer is the hinge between the two: the place a declaration becomes a deed.
Two rungs, one hand-off
It is layers 6 and 7 of the nine-layer Web 4 map. Layer 6, representation, is the AAO charter: how the organization is shown to machines. Layer 7, execution, is the operating system the agents run on: how the declarations become decisions, with consequential ones routed to a named human.
Together they are the AAO Stack, and the seam between them is deliberate — a charter names roles, never software, so the runtime staffing a role can change without the organization’s declarations changing. Roles outlive the software that staffs them, the way offices outlive office-holders.
Why the authority only ever narrows
The load-bearing rule of the agency layer is attenuation: a grant carries only a subset of what the granter held, never more, and every action resolves to a named accountable human. Agents suggest; humans consent.
An agency layer that let an agent hold authority its principal lacked would be the failure the whole stack exists to prevent — activity nobody authorized, attributable to nobody. That is why the layer is defined by what it refuses as much as by what it enables, and why a running one produces an append-only record rather than a claim about the past.