Agent Authorization
A decision made before an agent operates, by a named person with standing, that this agent may act for a stated purpose within defined limits.
VOCABULARY
Governance Vocabulary
Core terms used across the frameworks, field notes, and governance writing. Each definition is designed to stay consistent in public use.
Active
Agent Sprawl
The accumulation of agents faster than any function can account for them.
Governance Debt
The accumulated backlog of unresolved accountability decisions created when AI agents are deployed faster than governance structures can absorb them.
Intent Architecture
The practice of writing down what an agent is for, and what it may not do, before it is capable of doing anything.
Intent Architecture Stack
Three organizational layers, in fixed order, that must exist before an agent is authorized to operate: Context, Intent, and Governance.
Tenant Agent Reconciliation
The periodic exercise of comparing every agent the platform can see against every agent the organization authorized.
The Accountability Assumption
The condition in which every function believes another function owns an agent's risk, and the belief is unanimous, reciprocal, and unwritten.
The Authorization Coverage Lifecycle
The path from not knowing what you run, to knowing, to preventing new unauthorized deployment faster than it accumulates.
The Authorization Layer
The layer of decisions above a platform's controls: who decided this agent should operate, within what bounds, on whose authority.
The Authorization Record
The single artifact carrying an agent's purpose, permitted actions, prohibitions, data scope, accountable people, and a signature predating production.
The Chain Authorization Gap
Each agent in a chain is individually approved, no one approved the chain, and the original approval travels its whole length unrevisited.
The Disposition Protocol
The standing rule that every signal about an agent receives a recorded decision rather than a reaction.
The Intent Gap
The distance between what a system was intended to do and what it actually does.