Authenticated Delegation Between Autonomous AI Agents

Abstract

Distributed multi-agent systems increasingly allow autonomous AI agents to assign tasks, invoke tools, coordinate specialized capabilities, and act across organizational and computational boundaries. Yet assigning a task is not equivalent to transferring legitimate authority. This article develops authenticated delegation as an architectural security requirement for autonomous multi-agent systems. Delegated authority must remain attributable to a legitimate source, explicitly bounded, resistant to amplification, contextually valid, revocable, and supported by sufficient provenance and evidence for independent verification. Building upon workload identity, authorization, Zero Trust, least privilege, and delegated access, the article distinguishes authentication from authority and task propagation from authority propagation. Within SGAEIA, these concerns are expressed as technology-independent architectural properties and invariants. The objective is not to prescribe a delegation protocol or credential format, but to establish what must remain true when legitimate authority crosses autonomous-agent boundaries.

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