Agent delegation and authority amplification: how to stop scope creep
The most dangerous failure in multi-agent systems isn't a single bad action — it's a child agent silently inheriting more authority than it should.
The amplification problem
When an agent delegates to a child agent, the child needs some authority to do its job. But if that authority isn't bounded, a chain of delegations can silently amplify — each child inheriting a little more than its parent intended.
This is how a "harmless" sub-task becomes a system-level action nobody approved.
Attenuation-only delegation
The rule that prevents this is simple and strict:
Child authority ⊆ Parent authority ∩ Root allowed authority
A delegation that amplifies authority must be denied. A child agent may only ever receive a subset of what its parent could do — never more.
Why a root ceiling matters
Parent/child attenuation alone isn't enough. If the top-level agent has too much authority, the whole tree inherits it. You need a root ceiling that caps the entire delegation tree — a boundary that no child, at any depth, can exceed.
That's the role of a signed sovereignty.json: a persistent, human-owned ceiling above every grant and every delegation chain.
The invariant
Effective authority = delegated authority ∩ SovereignRoot allowed authority
Decision precedence: DENY > REQUIRE_APPROVAL > ALLOW. A downstream grant can never override a root deny.
Build the ceiling
SovereignRoot is a working protocol for a portable, cryptographically signed root policy. Generate yours locally — no account, no upload, no backend.