Evidence note · reviewed 29 July 2026
An agent is authority delegated to software.
The central question is not whether it can plan. It is which identity may use which tool, on which object, for how long, at what cost, with whose approval.
Minimum action contract
- Identity
- named human and agent seat
- Scope
- exact objects and purpose
- Tools
- allow-list and argument bounds
- Budget
- time, cost, steps and rate
- Gate
- human approval before impact
- Receipt
- request, result and state change
- Stop
- immediate revocation path
- Replay
- evidence sufficient to reconstruct
Separate advice from action
Drafting, searching and proposing are lower-authority modes. Sending, approving, purchasing, deleting, publishing or changing production state require narrower grants and explicit gates. The model must not infer that authority from conversational tone.
Evidence boundary: an audit log records behaviour; it does not make over-broad authority safe.