Skip to main content
Multi-agent pipelines hand authority downward. Almost every implementation copies the parent’s permissions to the child instead of subdividing them, so a pipeline of five agents each holding a £10,000 limit is a pipeline with a £50,000 limit that nobody agreed to. Two properties stop that, and both are enforced rather than documented.

​
Attenuation is refused, not warned about

A delegated grant may be narrower than its parent on every dimension and wider on none: scope, window, budget, conditions, enforcement mode.
The API refuses to issue one that exceeds its parent. Not a warning, not a lint rule, not a line in a design document. The call fails and the pipeline does not start, so an engineer finds out at development time rather than an auditor finding out at quarter end.
A constraint that can be worked around under deadline pressure is not a constraint, it is a preference. This is why it lives in the issuer rather than in review.
A parent must opt in by setting delegation_policy: "attenuating". The default is none, which means an agent cannot delegate at all. Authority to hand authority onward is itself an authority.

​
Spend debits every ancestor

Attenuation alone is not enough. Give every child £5,000 under a £25,000 parent and ten children still spend £50,000. So when a leaf spends, the debit lands on the leaf and on every grant above it to the root. Two things follow:
  • The root’s ceiling is the tree’s ceiling. However the work is divided, the total is bounded by what the accountable human signed for.
  • An exhausted ancestor refuses a child that still has room. This looks wrong the first time an engineer sees it and is exactly right. The child’s own allowance was never the operative limit.

​
Revocation reaches down

Revoking a parent revokes its children. The part usually skipped is the interval: between the revoke and the last child stopping there is a window, and actions may have been permitted in it. “We revoked at 14:02” is not an answer to “what did it do at 14:03”. The record answers it.

​
Recording a delegation in the trajectory

Delegation is also a step worth recording even where no new grant is minted, so the trajectory shows the handoff:

​
Next

Delegate authority

The call, and what to check afterwards.