Actor
Who or what is requesting power.
Authority Cloud · Delegation origin
Power should have a source.
Not an assumption.
Authority Cloud models where machine power came from, what it covers, how far it may be delegated, when it expires, and what becomes invalid when authority is revoked. It gives ActionGate a current, attributable authority lineage instead of asking identity, credentials, or agent intent to impersonate permission.
AUTHORITY CLOUD / SYNTHETICLINEAGE AC-91F2
ROOT GRANTTreasury operations authority
Principal: finance authority · purpose: approved supplier payments · ceiling: $100k · validity: 30d · redelegation depth: 1
CHILD SUBJECTPAYMENT-AGENT-14
ACTIONSUPPLIER PAY
CHILD CEILING$25K
VALIDITY4 HOURS
DENIESINHERITED
REVOCATIONCLEAR
EFFECTIVE AUTHORITYATTENUATED
The child grant is narrower than its parent. It may establish eligibility for an ActionGate decision, but it does not issue an Action Permit or release a credential.
Synthetic architecture illustration. No customer delegation, live authority, production action, external proof, or realized customer result is represented.
Product definition
What is Authority Cloud?
Authority Cloud is StableMind's system for explicit delegated machine authority. It represents the accountable source of power and the boundaries that travel with that power: grantor, grantee, purpose, action scope, resources, destinations, financial or operational ceilings, validity, delegation depth, inherited denies, approvals, separation-of-duties conditions, and revocation lineage. Its job is not to decide an action or execute one. Its job is to make the authority facts current, inspectable, and attributable before a consequential request reaches ActionGate.
Authority origin
01 / DELEGATION
Identity tells you who the machine is. Delegation tells you why it has power.
An authenticated agent may possess credentials, tools, memory, a business purpose, and a human sponsor while still lacking authority to perform a particular consequential action. Authority Cloud keeps those facts separate. Power must trace to an accountable principal through an explicit grant rather than being inferred from technical reach, organizational ownership, a prompt, or the machine's own confidence.
Possibility
What the current agent version can technically attempt.
Legitimacy
Who granted which bounded power, for what purpose, and for how long.
Provenance
How the effective authority derives from every valid ancestor right now.
Authority lineage
02 / PROVENANCE
Every effective clause should be explainable back to its source.
Authority Cloud does not flatten delegation into a role label. It preserves the chain so an evaluator can identify which principal granted the power, what narrowed at each hop, which denies survived, how much delegation depth remains, and whether any ancestor has expired or been revoked.
- 01Root principal
Identify the accountable human or organizational authority from which the power originates.
- 02Explicit grant
Bind purpose, actions, resources, environments, destinations, ceilings, validity, and delegation rights.
- 03Attenuation
Require every child scope and limit to remain equal to or narrower than every ancestor.
- 04Inherited constraints
Carry denies, approval requirements, separation of duties, and other non-removable boundaries down the chain.
- 05Current-state validation
Re-evaluate expiry, revocation, signatures, lifecycle state, parent evidence, and reserved shared budgets.
- 06Effective lineage
Produce the exact current authority facts ActionGate may use when evaluating one semantic action request.
EFFECTIVE AUTHORITY / SYNTHETICAC-LINEAGE-91F2
- Grantor
- finance-authority
- Grantee
- payment-agent-14
- Purpose
- approved supplier settlement
- Action
- supplier.payment.submit
- Ceiling
- $25,000 per action
- Validity
- 4 hours
- Redelegation
- none remaining
- Status
- CURRENT / NOT A PERMIT
Authority lineage establishes what may be considered. ActionGate still owns the independent decision for an exact requested consequence.
The attenuation invariant
03 / NO AMPLIFICATION
Delegated machine authority can contract. It cannot silently grow.
A child may receive fewer actions than its parent, never a new action the parent did not possess.
Named systems, accounts, environments, data classes, and destinations stay inside ancestral boundaries.
Financial, cost, concurrency, and shared budgets cannot be copied into children to manufacture more aggregate power.
Validity and remaining redelegation depth can shrink at each hop and can never outlive the parent grant.
Recursive and multi-agent delegation
04 / COMPOSITION
More agents should not mean more authority.
Explicitly permitted
An agent may delegate only authority it actually possesses and only when the parent grant explicitly permits another hop. Every signed child grant must remain inside every ancestor.
Shared budgets stay shared
Ten child agents cannot each inherit the parent's full economic or concurrency ceiling. Active reservations are evaluated together so delegation cannot multiply consequence capacity.
No accidental union
Collaborating agents do not gain the union of one another's privileges. Joint work requires a governed mandate, exact roles, participant lineages, purpose, target, quorum, and validity.
No mix-and-match authority
The action scope of one independent grant cannot be quietly combined with the resource scope of another unless policy explicitly authorizes that composition.
Revocation
05 / CURRENT POWER
A delegation graph is only trustworthy if invalidation can travel down it.
Authority is evaluated as current state, not historical possession. If a parent grant is revoked, expires, fails signature validation, is quarantined, or is superseded by lifecycle state, descendants that depend on it become ineffective. The leaf cannot keep power merely because its own record still exists.
01ROOT GRANT
Active principal authority establishes the maximum possible boundary.
02CHILD GRANT
Narrower delegated authority depends on the continuing validity of its parent.
03REVOCATION EVENT
A governed revocation changes current authority state instead of waiting for credentials to expire naturally.
04DESCENDANT INVALIDATION
Dependent leaf authority stops contributing eligibility to later ActionGate decisions.
05NEW DECISION
An agent must return to current authority facts. Historical access or a previous permit cannot restore revoked power. Guardian carries revocation toward the runtime boundary.
Constitutional boundaries
06 / WHAT IT DOES NOT DO
Authority Cloud makes power legible. It does not turn lineage into execution.
A valid lineage makes an action eligible for independent evaluation. ActionGate still decides the exact request.
Credentials remain downstream execution material and cannot be used as proof that delegated authority existed.
An authenticated principal, agent owner, human sponsor, or commercial customer state is never substituted for a grant.
Policy can narrow, condition, or deny already delegated power. It cannot manufacture authority that no principal granted.
Prompts, retrieved documents, tool output, emails, and model-generated instructions cannot impersonate delegated authority.
Evidence can establish history and provenance. It cannot retroactively authorize an action that lacked power beforehand.
From institutional intent to machine-evaluable authority
07 / TRANSLATION
A delegation system has to preserve meaning while making boundaries executable.
A grant should retain why the authority exists, not only which API method happens to implement it. Purpose provides a governed boundary for actions that may be technically similar but institutionally different, such as paying an approved supplier versus moving funds to a newly introduced destination.
Authority should resolve to the accounts, environments, services, data classes, regions, destinations, or counterparties the principal actually intended. Broad technical reach is never used as a shortcut for missing resource scope.
Amounts, aggregate exposure, concurrency, duration, autonomy, and other consequential ceilings remain first-class authority facts. Delegation can reserve or narrow those limits, but cannot clone them across children until the organization accidentally authorizes more aggregate power than the parent possessed.
Human approval, quorum, separation of duties, geographic restrictions, data-handling requirements, and explicit denies remain attached to the lineage. A child grant cannot become easier to exercise merely because authority traveled through another machine.
Every decision should use the authority that is valid now. Expiry, revocation, quarantine, supersession, signature failure, or missing ancestor evidence can make a once-valid lineage ineffective even if an agent still remembers an old grant or retains technical access.
An evaluator should be able to reconstruct the source grants, grantors and grantees, attenuation at each hop, inherited denies, effective limits, expiration, and remaining delegation depth. If the system cannot explain where effective power came from, it should not quietly infer that power.
Evaluator questions
08 / BUYER CLARITY
Questions a delegated-authority system should answer without hand-waving.
- What is delegated authority for an AI agent?
- Delegated authority is explicit power granted by an accountable principal to a machine actor for bounded purposes, actions, resources, destinations, limits, and time. It is separate from authentication and from technical capability.
- Can an AI agent delegate authority to another agent?
- Only when its own valid parent grant explicitly permits redelegation. The child must be signed, attributable, and equal to or narrower than every ancestor, including inherited denies and approval requirements.
- What happens when a parent delegation is revoked?
- A revoked parent contributes no current authority, so descendants that depend on that parent become ineffective. Every later action evaluation must re-verify the complete lineage rather than trust stale leaf state.
- Can multiple grants be combined automatically?
- No. Independent grants remain independent authority clauses. StableMind does not take the action permission from one grant and the resource permission from another unless an explicit policy authorizes that composition.
- Does Authority Cloud replace IAM?
- No. IAM remains important for identity and access. Authority Cloud addresses a different question: which consequential institutional power was actually delegated to this machine, from whom, under what boundaries, and with what current revocation state?
- Does a valid Authority Cloud lineage mean an action is permitted?
- No. Authority lineage is an input to ActionGate. The exact semantic request must still pass the independent deterministic decision boundary before a bounded Action Permit can exist.
Public truth boundary
An authority model is not a customer delegation.
This page describes StableMind architecture and product behavior. Its lineage examples are synthetic. It does not claim a named legal customer, live customer authority, governed production action, external production proof, recognized revenue, or realized customer value.
Read the Public Truth ContractFrom authority to decision
Once power has a source, ActionGate can decide whether this action fits inside it.
Authority Cloud answers where the power came from and what its current limits are. ActionGate answers whether the exact requested consequence is inside those limits now. Public account onboarding remains inactive until SIO19, and this website surface creates no delegation, permit, credential, or machine authority.
website_session_creates_authority=false