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How does a sub agent's authority attenuate

When one agent hands work to another, no adopted standard says the second may receive less authority than the first, or how a resource server at the end of the chain could check. Token exchange can record an actor, an Internet-Draft proposes chains that may only narrow, and the agent to agent protocol carries no identity at all.

The verdict

Open question

No settled answer exists. The ledger poses the question, links the live debate, and does not answer it.

Key facts

What the sources say

Record ID
AAL-2026-0033
Kind
Open question
Jurisdiction
Global
Last verified
Added
  • RFC 8693 lets a token record that one party is acting for another, but does not require the exchanged token to be narrower.
  • The A2A documentation states that its payloads do not carry user or client identity information directly.
  • The Agent Passport System Internet-Draft proposes delegation chains that cannot widen across seven constraint dimensions, and it is not an adopted standard.
  • Singapore's framework notes that multi agent setups let each agent's tools and permissions be scoped separately, which is guidance rather than a mechanism.

Dimension by dimension

1 dimension, each one stated, silent or open

Delegation. Stated means the document you can open below says it; silent means the ledger read the document and it does not.

DelegationOpen
No adopted standard requires that authority narrow as it passes from one agent to the next, and no resource server can verify a chain it cannot see.RFC Editor, RFC 8693, primary source, 1 January 2020.

What it changes

For a team deploying an agent

If your design has one agent calling another, do the attenuation yourself. Mint a separate, narrower credential for each hop rather than passing the first one along, and record which principal each hop is acting for, because no protocol in production will do that for you today.

Sources

What this record was verified against

  1. RFC Editor, RFC 8693Primary · 1 January 2020
  2. A2A Protocol documentation, Enterprise ReadyPrimary · 15 September 2026
  3. IETF Datatracker, draft-pidlisnyi-aps-03Primary · 18 July 2026

Related

Records that sit beside this one

Cite this record

Free to reuse under CC BY 4.0, with attribution. The record ID AAL-2026-0033 is permanent and is never reused.

In a sentence
According to the GAGE Agent Authority Ledger (as of 15 September 2026), how does a sub agent's authority attenuate.
APA
GAGE (Global Academy of Generative-AI Education). (2026). How does a sub agent's authority attenuate. Agent Authority Ledger. Retrieved 15 September 2026, from https://www.gage.academy/tools/agent-authority-ledger/records/AAL-2026-0033-how-does-a-sub-agents-authority-attenuate
MLA
"How does a sub agent's authority attenuate." Agent Authority Ledger, GAGE (Global Academy of Generative-AI Education), 15 September 2026, https://www.gage.academy/tools/agent-authority-ledger/records/AAL-2026-0033-how-does-a-sub-agents-authority-attenuate.
Chicago
GAGE (Global Academy of Generative-AI Education). "How does a sub agent's authority attenuate." Agent Authority Ledger. Last modified 15 September 2026. https://www.gage.academy/tools/agent-authority-ledger/records/AAL-2026-0033-how-does-a-sub-agents-authority-attenuate.
Permalink
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