Identity systems prove who an actor is. Access controls decide what they can call. Logs record what they did. None of these, alone or together, give boards, auditors, regulators, or counterparties what they actually need: an evidentiary chain that ties a specific autonomous action to a specific delegated authority, with consent, policy, and revocation state preserved.
Knowing an agent is who it claims to be is the start of accountability, not the end. An identified agent operating outside its authorized scope is still operating outside its authorized scope.
ACLs and IAM rules live inside individual systems. They do not travel between organizations or between agents. Cross-agent delegation is invisible to the systems being acted upon.
Logs describe behavior but do not prove authority for that behavior. They can be tampered with, lost, or selectively produced. They are a record of the system, not of the relationship between principal and subject.
Chain-of-custody for autonomous execution. Each step in the delegation graph carries a signed credential. Each action produces a signed, hash-chained receipt that references the credential, the policy, the consent, and the outcome. Revocation is first-class and cascades.
A finance leader delegates an agent to purchase office goods up to a fixed ceiling, from a vendor allowlist, for a quarter. The agent in turn delegates a narrower scope to a sub-agent. Each purchase yields a receipt that references the entire delegation chain. Revocation at any layer cascades.
A research consortium grants a holon read-only access to a shared dataset for the duration of an approved study. The holon's verifier daemon produces a receipt for every read. When the study closes, the consortium revokes; outstanding receipts remain valid evidence of past access.
A clinical operations team delegates an assistive agent to triage non-clinical workflows under strict policy constraints. Every action carries a receipt that an auditor can later verify against the issued AVC and the active policy at execution time.