Authority Attenuation: Structural Invariants for Meta-Agent Oversight

Agentic systems increasingly allow agents to spawn subagents, delegate tasks, access resources, and evolve at runtime. These delegation chains create a security problem: authority granted to one agent may propagate across descendants, while compromised or evolving agents may attempt to acquire additional authority. We present a model in which delegation cannot amplify authority beyond the delegating lineage. An agent's authority is the set of protected actions the runtime may execute on its behalf, and spawning is itself such an action. The model provides two guarantees: admitted runtime transitions preserve delegation integrity, and every descendant's current authority is contained in that of each creation ancestor. We enforce these guarantees with Mandates, runtime-minted signed objects that record an identifier, root, derivation parent, holder, and permitted actions. A derived Mandate may preserve or remove actions but cannot add an action absent from its parent. Regrant may enlarge a child's previous grant, but only within the delegating parent's active Mandate. Mandate lineage provides verifiable authority provenance and descendant-aware revocation. We distinguish declared from current authority and state the limits of attenuation under action composition and information flow.