Even after Authorization defines what an Actor may do, another important question remains: Who granted that Authority?

In environments where AI Agents distribute Tasks across multiple Agents, Authority is not necessarily confined to a single Actor. It may be Delegated together with a Task, from a Human to an AI Agent and subsequently to another AI Agent.

Delegation, however, does not mean copying the original Authority without limitation. Each Delegation can be constrained by Scope, Time, and Conditions, and a Delegator cannot delegate Authority beyond the Authority it possesses.

For example, a Human Owner may delegate Research & Analysis to AI Agent A, which may delegate Search & Summarize to Agent B, which may further delegate only the retrieval of Data from Dataset B to Agent C. As the Delegation Chain progresses, the Authority of each Actor remains constrained by its respective Scope, Time, and Conditions.

The same structure can apply when Authority flows from an Organization through a Human to an AI Agent. What matters is that each Delegation is not treated as an independent grant of authority, but that the origin of Authority is preserved as a Chain.

When an AI Agent attempts to perform an Action, it therefore becomes possible to trace not only whether the Agent has Authority, but also who delegated it, whether the Delegator itself had Authority to delegate, what Scope was transferred, whether the Delegation remains valid, and what Conditions apply.

A Delegation Chain therefore preserves the lineage of Authority:

Who authorized whom, to do what, under which conditions, and for how long?

This becomes particularly important in Multi-Agent Systems. As the number of Agents increases, the origin of Authority must not become ambiguous or proliferate without traceability. Even when a Task is decomposed across multiple Agents, the Authority associated with the final Action must remain traceable through the Delegation Chain to its origin.

Delegation is therefore more than a mechanism for assigning Tasks to Agents.

Authority remains traceable across the Delegation Chain.

The foundation of Governable Delegation is the ability to distribute Authority without losing its origin, Scope, Conditions, or period of validity.