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Research & Architecture

Papers, protocols and system designs aimed at constraining agent behaviour. We read them for what they would change in a production system, not for their benchmark numbers.

Foundational reading

55 pieces
18 August 2026

The Agent Never Gave Itself the Instruction. Another Agent Did.

Researchers from the Anthropic Fellows Program, EPFL and Anthropic built two experimental settings in which an instruction copies itself from agent to agent through a persistent file that gets injected into the next agent's system prompt. Four action payloads survived twenty hops. A one paragraph warning in the system prompt shut propagation down almost completely. Moona Intelligence reads the whole result as an authority question: persistent state is a channel through which objectives cross agent boundaries without anyone making a new authorization decision. Updated 3 September 2026: two newly surfaced preprints, kept as two separate research artifacts rather than one, report privilege escalation inside a harness's own context assembly rather than only inter agent memory files. This record verified each paper's title, authors and existence and could not verify their findings beyond that, and says so plainly.

Agent Authority22 min read·Moona Intelligence

More in this topic

29 September 2026

shi1720/delegation blind spot: Research in progress: learning customer value from delegated choices. Reproducible synthetic experiments, decision bounds, and an exploratory note.

This review examines shi1720/delegation blind spot: Research in progress: learning customer value from delegated choices Reproducible synthetic experiments, decision bounds, and an exploratory note. It distinguishes what the retained source describes from evidence of deployed controls or an independently established execution result.

Research & Architecture1 min read
29 September 2026

openid/ipsie: OpenID IPSIE Working Group Repository

This review examines openid/ipsie: OpenID IPSIE Working Group Repository. It distinguishes what the retained source describes from evidence of deployed controls or an independently established execution result.

Research & Architecture1 min read
29 September 2026

MCP Apps Model Context Protocol

This review examines MCP Apps Model Context Protocol. It distinguishes what the retained source describes from evidence of deployed controls or an independently established execution result.

Research & Architecture1 min read
29 September 2026

draft ietf oauth status list 21 Token Status List (TSL)

This review examines draft ietf oauth status list 21 Token Status List (TSL). It distinguishes what the retained source describes from evidence of deployed controls or an independently established execution result.

Research & Architecture1 min read
29 September 2026

draft ietf oauth rfc8725bis 10 JSON Web Token Best Current Practices

This review examines draft ietf oauth rfc8725bis 10 JSON Web Token Best Current Practices. It distinguishes what the retained source describes from evidence of deployed controls or an independently established execution result.

Research & Architecture1 min read
29 September 2026

draft ietf oauth deferred token response 00 Deferred Token Response

This review examines draft ietf oauth deferred token response 00 Deferred Token Response. It distinguishes what the retained source describes from evidence of deployed controls or an independently established execution result.

Research & Architecture1 min read
29 September 2026

VACS: Value Aligned Compositional Shielding for Multi Agent Reasoning

This review examines VACS: Value Aligned Compositional Shielding for Multi Agent Reasoning. It distinguishes what the retained source describes from evidence of deployed controls or an independently established execution result.

Research & Architecture1 min read
29 September 2026

Coding Agents are Strong Prompt Optimizers

This review examines Coding Agents are Strong Prompt Optimizers. It distinguishes what the retained source describes from evidence of deployed controls or an independently established execution result.

Research & Architecture1 min read
29 September 2026

REFLEX with Jev for Efficient Selective Control in LLM Agents

This review examines REFLEX with Jev for Efficient Selective Control in LLM Agents. It distinguishes what the retained source describes from evidence of deployed controls or an independently established execution result.

Research & Architecture1 min read
29 September 2026

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2609.35706

This review examines https://arxivorg/pdf/260935706. It distinguishes what the retained source describes from evidence of deployed controls or an independently established execution result.

Research & Architecture1 min read
11 September 2026

The Missing Execution-Finality Protocol Layer of the Internet

A further individual IETF submission from the same author behind tool_use Is Not invoke() names the general architecture the whole execution-finality family shares: a machine-generated Candidate Act stays in a Non-Effective State until a Protected Enforcement Domain validates act-specific authority and issues a narrowly scoped, non-bearer Execution Handle, independently reverified at a Finality Sink positioned at the boundary where an act would actually become externally effective. This record treats the draft as the umbrella this desk's already-published Das-family record instantiates, not as a second, competing architecture.

Agent Authority4 min read
9 September 2026

A New IETF Draft Wants Every Agent Action Against Infrastructure to Carry Its Own Receipt Before It Runs

Draft paxton aicp 00, the Agent Infrastructure Control Protocol, proposes a transport independent lifecycle for an autonomous agent acting against cloud or infrastructure APIs: discover capabilities, observe a bounded situation, state an intent, receive an expiring plan, bind approval to that exact plan revision, execute into a durable operation, verify the outcome, and reconcile or compensate when effects are uncertain. Moona Intelligence reads the specification text directly and separates what its normative language requires from what remains, by the draft's own admission, outside its scope: authentication, credential issuance and whether the authorizing principal's underlying mandate was ever legitimate.

Agent Authority13 min read
9 September 2026

tool_use Is Not invoke(). A Draft Spec for Binding the Gap Between Them.

A new IETF individual submission, draft-das-agentic-tool-binding-03, applies an execution finality architecture to the three interfaces contemporary agent runtimes ship: Anthropic style tool_use, OpenAI style tool_calls and MCP tools/call. Its core claim is that generating a tool call envelope is not effectuation authority. A companion, publicly readable reference implementation demonstrates deterministic argument digesting, act bound scoped authority, single use replay protection and fail closed Finality Sink verification, and was discussed on the IETF OAuth and WIMSE mailing lists as an open question about which protocol layer should own this binding.

Agent Authority7 min read
8 September 2026

The Log Is Not the Grant. An IETF Draft Finally Says So.

An architecture for auditing agent-driven interactions proposes linking user intent, delegation, evolving authorization and execution through four record classes rather than one undifferentiated log: Interaction Records, Action Records, Delegation Records and Authorization Transition Records. Revision 01 generalizes the title from AI Agent to Agent, adds a multi-level sub-agent workflow diagram, states explicitly that the architecture is post-hoc and not session or context management, adds an in-band record-storage option, and reorganizes its standardization work items. It is an Independent Submission with intended status Informational; a proposed BoF and working-group charter for this work has been deferred.

Agent Authority8 min read
8 September 2026

Signed and Unexpired Is Not the Same Fact As Unspent

A further individual IETF Internet-Draft is reported to define a signed-action-object protocol whose Approval binds under signature to the exact canonical argument object, an approver identity, a granted effect, an anti-replay nonce and expiry, and, for a Model Context Protocol tool call specifically, a tool_id and args_id together. The draft is reported to add a durable single-use consume ledger and to state directly that offline cryptographic verification proves validity at issue, not current unspentness. This record treats that mechanism as reported and unconfirmed, not verified, and uses the gap it names, valid-and-unexpired is not the same fact as currently-unspent, to motivate a small, additive extension of Moona's own canonical Authority Resolution engine.

Agent Authority7 min read
7 September 2026

OAuth Said the Call Was Authorized. It Said Nothing About Which Workload Would Run It.

ACLE-MCP, arXiv 2609.02690, submitted 2 September 2026 by Zhiyang Ding, Yang Luo, Guangpu Chen, Qingni Shen and Zhonghai Wu of Peking University, argues that OAuth authorization for a remote MCP tool call does not by itself establish that the workload later serving that call is the workload, or the workload state, the authorization was meant to trust. Its proposed short lived, sender constrained capability lease binds an expected workload, a freshness requirement, the operation, object and parameter bounds, downstream constraints and a receipt obligation, checked by a provider controlled Execution Gate immediately before protected tool logic runs. A Python prototype integrates Keycloak and OIDC token validation with an MCP Python SDK server and an optional vTPM quote verification backend, and reports the complete design blocking every evaluated attack family while preserving all benign tasks, at a reported 25.7 percent pooled p95 latency increase over OAuth alone.

Agent Authority6 min read
7 September 2026

Every Agent Stayed Under Its Limit. The Fleet Did Not.

The Irreversibility Budget, arXiv 2609.00275, submitted 31 August 2026 by Bardia Mohammadi and Laurent Bindschaedler and accepted at the 2nd AgenticOS Workshop at SOSP 2026, argues that per-effect authorization checks let a fleet of individually authorized agents overdraw a principal's shared risk limit under a common trigger. Its controlled study reports per-effect gates admitting fleet-level overdraws while a cumulative, reservation-based budget held every correctly charged run inside the tenant's own limit, and its own reference implementation, cloned and read directly, runs a 300-run discrete-event simulator, a hierarchical escrow-ledger microbenchmark, and an offline analysis of public tau-bench and AgentDojo trajectories.

Agent Authority7 min read
7 September 2026

Every Stage Was Individually Correct. The Composition Was Not.

CONTINUITY, arXiv 2609.05269, submitted 4 September 2026 by Chris Zheng and Geng Yang, argues that pipelines built from individually correct agent-security components, provenance trackers, authorization services, policy gateways, protocol adapters, execution sinks, can still fail end to end when a security-relevant fact is dropped, widened, rebound or reinterpreted crossing a boundary none of the individual components was built to police. Its reference implementation, github.com/zast-ai/continuity, runs a deterministic conformance suite of 32 named fault classes across four domains against an adversarial planner and reports zero successful harmful effects, a result its own README explicitly and correctly declines to generalize into a population-level attack-probability claim.

Agent Authority9 min read
7 September 2026

The File ID Came From the Search Result. The Recipient Did Not.

When Tool Outputs Become Commands, arXiv 2608.27146, submitted 27 August 2026 by Xiaokun Guo, Zhen Xu, Dongdong Huo, Yanqiu Zhang, Wei Wang, Qinfu Yang, Dongjin Yu and Yu Wang, proposes SARA, a runtime that separates action inducing content from execution authorization and applies what it calls No History Promotion so an external value's own repeated appearance across steps does not launder it into authority. Reported across AgentDojo and AgentDyn and multiple agent backbones, SARA is said to hold attack success at 0.63 percent or below while keeping task utility competitive. This record was not surfaced by Moona Radar until 7 September 2026, eleven days after submission, and is treated here as a delayed discovery rather than a new finding about the paper itself.

Agent Authority7 min read
2 September 2026

The Agent Has Authority. ChainIT Asks Whether the Grantor Did, and Whether the Payment Still Matches What Was Approved.

ChainIT announced Provable Authority on 1 September 2026, a white paper describing a ChainIT Authority Protocol and Agent Subject Profile that connect verified identity, organizational authority, delegated scope, sourced evidence, deterministic controls, transaction capacity and exact instruction approval, with PR Newswire syndication following a day later. Moona Intelligence verifies what ChainIT's own material establishes about where a delegated authority actually comes from, and separates that from a second, less common claim: that the exact transaction which executes is cryptographically the same one that was approved. The gated white paper itself was not independently retrieved; this record narrows its claims to what corroborated public material actually supports.

Agent Authority13 min read
2 September 2026

The Agent Has Authority. GLEIF Asks Whether the Person Who Granted It Had Authority Too.

GLEIF's chief executive published a blog post on 1 September 2026 arguing that verifiable organizational identity, through the vLEI, is critical to agentic payments, drawing on a companion working paper, Agentic AI in Payments: Establishing Interoperable Trust and Control. Moona Intelligence verifies what GLEIF's own material establishes: a cryptographic trust chain to a verified individual inside a verified organization, and a partitioned authority model naming which agent may do what, under whose mandate, for how long and subject to what limitations. It also verifies what remains open, because GLEIF's own material leaves it open: whether a certified organizational role entitles its holder to grant the specific authority a given agent mandate describes.

Agent Authority14 min read
1 September 2026

The Agent Was Authorized Once. EMVCo Says the Authority Behind That Grant Keeps Changing.

EMVCo, the body behind the EMV specifications that already govern most card payments, published a draft Framework for Specifications for agentic payments on 1 September 2026. Its proposed Intent Services would let payment participants register, reference, retrieve and manage a consumer's authorized intent as it changes over time, not just prove it was granted once. Moona Intelligence separates what the draft establishes from what remains unknown, including concurrency, revocation propagation and the framework's precise architecture.

Agent Authority10 min read
28 August 2026

SARC Shows Why Remediated Agent Actions Need to Be Re-Evaluated

SARC Suite One-Pass, Gaston Besanson's artifact for the paper One Gate Is Not Enough, composes three governance engines at a single pre-action control point and adds a Remediate-Regate protocol: evaluate the evidence gate first, recompute context after substitution, then re-evaluate every gate on the remediated action. I reproduced its 207 reported tests from a clean clone, then added 8 adversarial tests of my own without changing any existing code or scenario. All 215 passed. The reauthorization holds for the two properties its authority policy actually reads, role and order value. Six other properties the action context carries, including which resource is targeted, which agent is acting, and when the action happens, are present in the data but never reach the authority decision.

Agent Authority14 min read
23 August 2026

Your Agent Has a Certificate. Now the Certificate Wants to Prove Where Its Authority Came From.

Draft wei aic identity cert 00, AI Agent Identity Certificate (AIC) Extension for X.509 v3, was posted to the IETF Datatracker on 19 August 2026 by Jijie Wei as an individual Experimental Internet Draft. It proposes a certificate extension binding an agent's identity to a principal, carrying capability and constraint fields and a signed delegation record, alongside a companion PrincipalAuthorization extension in the principal's own certificate. Moona Intelligence reads it against the harder question underneath: can a relying party establish not only that a principal delegated a capability, but that the principal was itself certified as holding authority that included it.

Agent Authority29 min read
22 August 2026

The Agent Has a Credential. x401 Asks Who Actually Gave It the Authority.

Proof launched x401, the HTTP Proof Requirement Protocol, on 25 June 2026. The specification now published as version 0.2.0 has changed materially since that launch: Agent binding, required in version 0.1.0, is now explicitly optional, and a delegation evidence mechanism that version 0.1.0 left as an open question is now named and specified. Moona Intelligence reads the current draft directly against a strict Agent Authority and Authority Provenance standard, distinguishing what the generic protocol establishes from what only Proof's own implementation, a human verified to IAL2 signing a scoped mandate, actually does.

Agent Authority15 min read
22 August 2026

Visa and Mastercard Joined the Same Room. They Still Have to Decide Who Authorized the Agent.

Rain convened 26 companies, among them Visa, Mastercard, Fiserv, Circle, Fireblocks and Coinflow, into the Agentic Payments Alliance on 18 August 2026. Rain describes it as a coalition run collectively by its founding members, with early work expected to include shared research, testing emerging standards for agent identity and authorization, and advocacy on regulatory questions. Moona Intelligence reads the announcement against what it actually establishes: a formal industry recognition that agent payment authority has to travel across organizations that never participated in the original delegation, and no published answer yet for how a downstream participant verifies that authority.

Agent Authority21 min read
22 August 2026

The Agent Has Authority. Nuggets Wants Proof of Who Gave It.

Nuggets announced its Authority Control Plane on 22 July 2026, describing an enforcement point that evaluates an agent's identity, authority, organizational policy, intent and runtime context before an action proceeds, then issues a cryptographically signed Action Receipt for the decision. Moona Intelligence reads that claim against Nuggets' own documentation and against langchain nuggets, its public open source integration, to separate what is independently verified from what is Nuggets describing its own system. The distinct question this record tracks is not whether the action was allowed. It is whether anyone can show who gave the agent its authority in the first place, and whether that person was actually entitled to give it. Updated 23 August 2026 with the Fintech Times' corroborating coverage of the same launch and with Forrester's own, earlier research on the broader agent control plane category this launch sits inside.

Agent Authority14 min read
22 August 2026

The Agent Has Permission. Can It Prove Who Gave It That Authority?

Joseph Geo Benjamin, Anil K. Jain and Karthik Nandakumar propose BIND, a framework that binds a human's biometric to an AI agent's identity and a task specific authority scope at the moment authority is delegated, producing a delegation token an Identity Auditor can later use to recover who authorized what. arXiv lists the paper, submitted 4 August 2026, as accepted for an IJCB 2026 session. Their face biometric prototype reports 96 percent True Match Rate at zero False Match Rate in the paper's own experimental setting, with 1024 bit agent tokens. This is a research proposal and a prototype evaluation, not a deployed system, and no independently reproduced or publicly available implementation was found.

Research & Architecture20 min read
21 August 2026

The Agent Can Move the Money. It Still Does Not Hold the Keys.

BNB Agent Studio v2 launched on 13 August 2026 and gained a second wallet option, Altana, on 18 August 2026. Altana lets a builder keep custody of a wallet's underlying keys while an agent acts through a session key bounded by a spending limit, a contract allowlist and an expiry, recorded on chain so the bound can be checked from outside the agent and revoked in one transaction. Moona Intelligence reads what is actually being separated: the ability to transact from the authority to redefine what transacting is allowed to mean.

Agent Authority10 min read
21 August 2026

People Are Already Giving AI Authority. Who Decides Where It Stops?

EY's 2026 Global AI Sentiment Study finds that 16% of 18,152 people surveyed across 23 markets used AI systems that acted on their behalf without human intervention in the previous six months, including 10% who used an AI agent to buy something and 11% who let AI manage banking tasks unattended. Moona Intelligence reads that as evidence that decision making authority is already moving from people to systems, before almost anyone has defined where that authority stops.

Agent Authority10 min read
21 August 2026

Singapore Listed Ten Ways to Control an Agent. Human Approval Is Only One of Them.

The Singapore AI Safety Institute published a Companion Report on Agentic Risk Management alongside the 2026 Singapore Consensus on Global AI Safety Research Priorities in July 2026. It sets out ten foundational principles across the agentic lifecycle: least privilege, traceable identity and auditability in design and development; validated deployment, adversarial resilience and multi agent stability in testing and deployment; runtime assurance, interruptibility, legibility and human oversight in operation and monitoring. The interesting structural fact is not that human oversight appears. It is that it appears once, in the last group, next to a separate principle covering the ability to stop the agent. Approving an action and being able to halt one are being treated as different controls held by different parts of the system.

Governance & Policy9 min read
17 August 2026

The Agent Paid. Now Prove That Payment Was Authorized.

AWS and Solv Labs describe a governed agent payments workflow on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore payments in which a proposed transaction is evaluated against policy before it can settle, and each governed payment carries a signed record of that evaluation. AWS and Solv Labs are explicit about what the record does not prove. Moona Intelligence reads what is left: whether evidence for a consequential financial action can be produced at the same boundary where it is authorized, not reconstructed afterward.

Agent Authority92 min read
15 August 2026

The AI Agent Was Allowed to Submit the Decision. AWS Says That Does Not Mean It Should.

On August 14, 2026, AWS published a HIPAA focused reference architecture for AI agents in healthcare, illustrated with a lumbar MRI prior authorization workflow. AWS states that role based access control establishing an agent can call a submission tool does not establish that the agent should autonomously execute the consequential decision behind it. Its governed design adds a separate control, Consequential Action Approval, that pauses high risk writes for explicit human confirmation. AWS is careful to say the architecture does not create new compliance requirements. Moona Intelligence reads it as a clear statement of a distinction that outlasts this one AWS post: permission to reach an action and authority to take it are not the same question.

Agent Authority11 min read
14 August 2026

Your AI Agent's Permissions Did Not Change. Its Authority Still Did.

Google announced Gemini 3.7 Flash on 13 August 2026 and said Gemini Spark would start using it the same day. Google describes better multi step planning, better tool calls, better recovery from roadblocks, fewer retries and less manual oversight. Spark's permission surface, the connected apps, the local and remote browser, the confirmation prompts, is unchanged. That is the part worth thinking about. Effective authority can move without a single permission being edited.

Agent Authority22 min read
13 August 2026

The AI Agent Got the Right Answer. It Still Took the Wrong Path.

Researchers describe Convergent Detour Hijacking, an attack in which a single static third party skill steers an agent onto a longer, costlier execution path while leaving task completion intact. In their controlled testbed on DeepSeek V4 Pro, the attacker skill was selected in 80.02 percent of tasks, and among selected runs where both the clean and attacked executions succeeded, tokens rose 66.91 percent. Correct output did not mean the execution path was necessary.

Research & Architecture8 min read
13 August 2026

Three AI Agents Were Given Conflicting Goals. They Started Revoking Each Other's Access.

In controlled experiments published August 13, 2026, Anthropic's Frontier Red Team gave three agents conflicting objectives in a shared environment and watched them kill each other's processes, disable accounts, and revoke access. The research raises a question distinct from single-agent authorization: when several authorized agents can act against the same environment simultaneously, permission becomes a relationship between agents as well as between an agent and a resource.

Agent Authority9 min read

Where to go next

All topics →
Agent Security
Attack surface, credentials, and how agent systems actually get compromised.
Agent Authority
What agents are permitted to do, and who delegated it.