AI Agent Delegation

Delegation connects a Principal—the human, organization or system on whose behalf an action is authorized—to an Agent, the AI entity that performs the action. It should make the source, purpose and limits of the agent’s authority understandable without treating the Principal’s full authority as transferable by default.

AI Agent Identity makes delegated action attributable, but identity does not grant authority. AI Ownership identifies the human accountable for the governed AI Object, while delegation describes authority transferred for actions performed on behalf of a Principal. Authorization systems may enforce permissions; delegation explains where the authority came from.

Enterprise governance keeps delegation current as purpose, boundaries, participants and lifecycle state change. Technical identity and IAM systems authenticate and enforce. Alterlayer governs the enterprise context and accountability around delegation; it does not issue delegation credentials, mint tokens or replace authorization infrastructure.

The Agent is the AI entity performing an action. The Principal is the human, organization or system on whose behalf the agent is authorized to act. Delegation connects them through defined authority: the Principal is the source of the mandate, and the Agent is the actor exercising it within agreed limits.

A Principal is not always the agent’s Owner. For example, an employee-facing agent may have one accountable Owner while acting on behalf of different authorized users for separate tasks. The organization should preserve both the identity of the acting agent and the identity or organizational context of the represented Principal.

Agent Identity answers “Who or what is this agent?” Delegation asks “What authority was transferred to this agent, by which Principal and for what purpose?” Identity makes delegation attributable, but it does not itself grant authority. The canonical AI Agent Identity definition explains that distinction in more detail.

AI Ownership answers “Who is humanly accountable for this governed AI Object?” Delegation answers what authority the agent received for actions on behalf of a Principal. The Owner and Principal may sometimes be the same person or organization, but they are not conceptually identical. AI Ownership remains the canonical owner of organizational accountability.

Delegation is the transfer of authority from a Principal to an Agent. Authorization is the determination and enforcement of whether an identified actor may perform a particular action or access a resource. IAM and OAuth infrastructure may enforce authorization; the enterprise still needs governance context explaining why the delegation is appropriate.

Delegation asks where the agent’s authority came from and what was transferred. Decision Authority asks which decisions the agent may make autonomously, which need human authorization and which remain human-only. They interact, but neither concept replaces the other.

Delegation should be constrained to the authority needed for an approved purpose rather than treated as an unlimited copy of the Principal’s authority. The appropriate boundaries depend on the organization, use case and risk; the following are governance considerations, not mandatory Alterlayer product fields:

• permitted actions and resources the agent may use, create, change or communicate with;
• scope, including the business purpose, workflow, population, data or organizational context;
• duration, such as a task, session, project or defined expiry date;
• contextual conditions that must be true before the authority applies;
• financial or transaction thresholds that limit value or exposure;
• human approval thresholds for material, sensitive or exceptional actions;
• re-delegation rules stating whether onward delegation is prohibited, bounded or approval-dependent;
• revocation conditions that narrow, suspend or end the authority.

An on-behalf-of relationship identifies who or what the agent represents for a particular action. An agent acting for a user should not simply inherit an unlimited representation of everything that user can do. Constrained or scoped delegation ties the representation to a purpose, action, resource, time period and other relevant conditions.

This distinction helps the enterprise understand both sides of the action: the Agent that acted and the Principal it represented. A technical token or workload identity can carry some of that context, while governance explains the approved purpose, human accountability, conditions and review status behind it.

Delegation may originate as Human → Agent, Organization → Agent, System → Agent or potentially Agent → Agent. Not all enterprise agents currently support agent-to-agent delegation, and the ability to call or hand work to another agent does not by itself prove that authority was transferred.

A delegation chain can be represented as Principal → Agent A → Agent B. The enterprise may need to understand the origin of the authority, the identity and role of every actor, and whether the scope became narrower or changed as authority moved through the chain. Technical systems may represent parts of this lineage; the governance need is to keep authority attributable and bounded.

Agent-to-agent delegation adds questions about attribution, authority propagation, revocation and ultimate human accountability. An agent that receives a task should not be assumed to receive every permission or decision right held by the delegating agent.

Re-delegation asks whether an agent may transfer some or all of its received authority to another agent. It should not be assumed merely because agents can communicate or coordinate work.

An organization may establish that re-delegation is prohibited, permitted within defined boundaries or subject to human authorization. If it is permitted, the onward authority should remain no broader than the authority available to the delegating agent, and the enterprise should be able to identify the originating Principal and each relevant hop.

A cross-organizational relationship may take the form Enterprise A / Principal → Agent A → service or Agent B operated by Enterprise B. Different organizations may control the identity systems, agents, policies and evidence at each stage, so the receiving party cannot rely on internal context alone.

These relationships raise additional questions about identity, trust, transferred authority, accountability, scope, revocation and traceability. Governance should clarify which enterprise controls each agent, what each party is expected to trust, how limitations survive the organizational boundary and how authority can be withdrawn or allowed to expire.

Delegated authority should not necessarily exist indefinitely. Relevant questions include whether it can expire, who can withdraw or narrow it, and what happens when the business purpose, represented Principal, accountable Owner or operating context changes.

As an agent moves through Active → Under Review → Restricted → Retired, its delegated authority may need to be reviewed, restricted or revoked. A credential may also expire or be revoked in an IAM system, but technical credential status and the organization’s decision to remove business authority are related rather than identical concepts.

AI Governance Operations provides the recurring operating process for keeping reviews, ownership, lifecycle decisions and authority context current over time.

Delegating authority to an AI agent does not delegate away ultimate organizational accountability. The organization should remain able to identify accountable humans even where an agent acts autonomously within bounded authority. AI Ownership, Human Oversight and AI Agent Governance connect the agent’s authority to accountable people, review and intervention.

Material delegation events may become meaningful governance activity. An authority grant, material expansion or restriction, approval of re-delegation, or revocation may warrant an AI Governance Record. That is a selective governance judgment: every technical authorization decision, token exchange or access log does not automatically become a Governance Record.

OAuth 2.0 Token Exchange (RFC 8693) is a published IETF standards-track RFC that defines technical delegation and impersonation semantics, including an actor that acts on behalf of another party. It is an important building block, not a complete enterprise AI agent governance model.

IETF WIMSE is developing workload identity components through working-group Internet-Drafts. Agent-specific authentication, authorization, delegation, auditing and cross-organizational proposals associated with this area include individual Internet-Drafts; those proposals remain works in progress and are not adopted IETF standards.

The W3C Agent Identity Registry Protocol Community Group is incubating agent identity and cross-organizational trust ideas, but Community Group work is not a W3C Recommendation. The OpenID AI Identity Management Community Group coordinates use cases and terminology; its charter excludes development of global agent-identity protocols.

Microsoft Entra Agent ID and comparable enterprise identity offerings are vendor implementations, not vendor-neutral standards. These systems may authenticate identities and enforce access. Their technical controls can inform governance without replacing the enterprise decisions that establish purpose, accountability and appropriate delegation.

Identity and IAM systems authenticate and enforce. Alterlayer governs enterprise context and accountability. Relevant governance questions include: Which agent received authority? From which Principal? For what purpose and within what boundaries? May it re-delegate? Has the authority changed? Does human review become necessary? Which governance decision should be retained?

Alterlayer can connect delegation context to an agent’s identity, Owner, purpose, lifecycle, oversight and material governance history. It does not claim to issue or validate delegation credentials, execute OAuth flows, authenticate agents or operate an authorization policy engine.

The broader AI Agent Governance definition explains the enterprise discipline around agent purpose, authority, access, oversight and lifecycle. Organizations that need ongoing help maintaining authority reviews, ownership, lifecycle decisions and governance records can explore Managed AI Governance.