Scoped Delegation

Granting an agent a limited, explicit set of permissions to act on a principal's behalf — bounded in scope, budget and time.

term

Scoped Delegation

category

identity

short_def

Granting an agent a limited, explicit set of permissions to act on a principal's behalf — bounded in scope, budget and time.

long_def

Delegation answers the second half of agent identity: not just 'which agent?' but 'authorized to do what, for whom, within what limits?'. Scoped delegation expresses bounded authority — e.g. spend up to a cap, only with approved merchants, for a fixed window — and underpins agent payment mandates (AP2) and permissioned payment rails (MPP). It is the principle that keeps an autonomous agent from exceeding what its principal allowed.

see_also

agent-identity ap2 verifiable-credentials

etymology_origin

— verify-against-primary-at-build ↗ https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6749 — scoped delegation generalises OAuth 2.0 'scopes' and delegated authorization (RFC 6749, 2012) to AI agents; no single coiner for the agent-delegation sense

related_to

agent-identity ap2 verifiable-credentials agent-as-buyer mpp

contrast_with

Unlike authentication, which proves who an agent is, scoped delegation defines what that agent is permitted to do on a principal's behalf — bounded authority, not identity; the two together gate any consequential agent action.

example

An AP2 payment mandate is a form of scoped delegation: it authorizes an agent to spend only up to a set amount, only for a specified transaction, on the human's behalf.

source

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6749

status

emerging

why_it_matters

Scoped delegation is the safety boundary of autonomous action; without it, granting an agent access means granting it unbounded authority — unacceptable for payments or writes.

sameAs

—

bridge_entity

protocols/identity/web-bot-auth

last_verified

2026-06-15

md_twin

/glossary/delegation.md

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