Delegated Authority for AI Agents

Delegated authority is how a human or organisation grants an AI agent permission to act — for a bounded set of powers, for a limited time, and revocably. The governing rule is attenuation: a grant may only ever carry a subset of the granter’s own authority, never more. Verifying an agent means verifying the whole delegation chain back to an accountable human, not just checking a signature at its end.

Rule

Attenuation — a subset, never inheritance

Bounded by

Scope, expiry, revocation

Verify

The chain, not just the signature

Principle

Least privilege

Why attenuation is the whole rule

If a child grant could hold authority its parent lacks, delegation would be an escalation of privilege rather than a controlled hand-off. So the invariant is absolute: every grant is a subset of the granter’s powers. A change that would break it is wrong, whatever its convenience.

Authorization is not authentication. Knowing an agent is who it claims to be does not tell you what it may do. Delegation answers the second question, and enforcement comes before minting — a system that can issue authority ahead of the thing that checks it is issuing theatre.

Questions

How do you revoke an agent’s authority?

A grant carries expiry and can be revoked; verification checks the chain at use time, so a revoked or expired link fails the whole chain.

What is least privilege for agents?

Granting an agent only the narrowest authority its task requires, for the shortest time, so a compromised or mistaken agent can do the least possible harm.