VAGP 0.1 · ORGANISATIONAL AUTHORITY INFRASTRUCTURE
THE AUTHORITY LAYERFOR AUTONOMOUS AI
Autonomous agents can act.
Verimand establishes why they may.
Identity tells you who.
Authority proves why.
Verimand resolves one complete organisational authority path for an agent action, binds it to the exact request, derives an execution grant and revalidates current authority at the protected resource. Revoked authority causes execution to be rejected.
Current authority can be revalidated at execution time. Revoked authority is rejected.
Continue along the authority pathFROM ANSWER TO ACTION
AI systems are crossing a boundary.
They no longer only produce answers. They stop infrastructure, move funds, change records and invoke tools. The missing layer is not another model. It is evidence that this exact action is inside an organisation’s current authority.
THE MISSING DISTINCTION
Identity
Who is this actor?
- Authentication
- Credentials
- Workload identity
THREE CONSERVATION LAWS
Authority should behave like a conserved quantity.
Delegation can route and narrow authority. It cannot manufacture more of it, spend it twice or preserve it after revocation.
child ⊆ parent
Not broader
Every delegation is narrower than or equal to its parent. Authority cannot expand downstream.
THE RESOLVE QUESTION
Does at least one complete, currently valid authority path cover the exact subject, action, resource and authoritative context?
RESOLVE establishes authority only. It does not make a policy, approval or final business decision.
FINITE AUTHORITY IS STATEFUL
€100 delegated.
€100 conserved.
When a €100 aggregate ceiling is delegated through a hierarchy, descendants share the original capacity. A reservation charges every finite ceiling on the exact root-to-leaf lineage.
Hierarchical budgets · independently reviewed40 + 35 + 25 = 100
TEMPORAL AUTHORITY
A grant must not outlive its source.
Current status and evidence freshness remain security inputs. Revocation or expiry breaks the exact witness path; a previously derived grant cannot rescue it at VERIFY.
Dynamic revocation · reviewed baseline · remediation re-review pendingEXACT ACTION BINDING
No semantic drift between decision and action.
The Bound Authority Decision and semantic Execution Grant preserve the exact subject, concrete action, resource, financial context, witness path and validity window.
THE RESOURCE IS THE FINAL WITNESS
Verify where consequence begins.
The resource side compares the attempted execution with the exact grant, current authority path, time, freshness and local replay state.
CLOUDOPS PROOF OF VALUE
One real chain. Three adversarial outcomes.
The local Proof of Value runs the core implementation against a simulated protected resource. This explainer mirrors its scenarios; it is not a hosted security endpoint.
cloud://eu-west/dev/vm-204
Exact subject, action and resource remain bound end to end.
THE AGENT GOVERNANCE STACK
RESEARCH POSITION
Identity is established.
Policy is established.
Authority provenance is not.
Verimand studies the space between organisational intent and autonomous execution: attenuation, graph witnesses, finite delegated capacity, freshness, exact binding and resource-side verification.
Explore the prior-art mapOPEN PROTOCOL · COMMERCIAL PRODUCT
Open authority semantics
Vendor-, infrastructure- and jurisdiction-neutral protocol contracts, invariants and conformance tests.
Read VAGPEnterprise authority infrastructure
A future operational control plane, integrations and managed deployment paths built around the open core semantics.
Commercial control plane · plannedEVIDENCE, NOT ASPIRATION
The implementation frontier is visible.
Every public claim maps to a repository capability and review state.
BUILD THE AUTHORITY LAYER
Autonomy scales only when authority remains bounded.
Start with the protocol, examine the local Proof of Value, and track the reviewed boundary in the open repository architecture.