Authority

What the Architecture Insists On

1. Authority originates with an accountable principal

   Evidence does not originate authority. It conditions how much of an accountable principal's authority may responsibly be delegated, to whom, for which decisions, and for how long.

2. Every hop must attenuate, never expand

   The chain from principal to acting agent has to be preserved end to end, and each delegation must be verified to narrow the grant it received — never to widen it.

3. Delegation is bound to the rule that authorized it

   A grant of authority is tied to the policy state that justified it. When that policy changes, the grant has to be re-derived rather than left standing on an assumption that no longer holds.

4. Not every constraint is releasable

   Some constraints are internally releasable under a named authority. Others are externally owned — by a lender, a counterparty, a regulator, or a filing — and no internal executive can approve through them, because the enterprise does not own the right to release them.

5. Competence is portable without being authority

   A portable competence assertion lets one institution attest to what an agent has demonstrated without that attestation carrying institutional authority across the boundary on its own.

6. Reconstruction is not optional

   Six months after a consequential action, the institution must be able to reconstruct which interpretation governed the decision, what evidence was available then, whose authority was exercised and through what chain, how the boundary was enforced, what changed, and whether it could have been undone.