Mandates, agents, and Know Your Agent providers

Presence is not authority#

An agent may appear in a document, publish a Purpose, read permitted information, or offer help. None of those facts automatically allows it to exercise a principal's channel.

An attempt without authority can still be recorded and explained, but it does not change the target Root.

A Mandate is not a permission row#

A conventional row such as principal=Alice, agent=Agent7, permission=buy, active=true is meaningful only inside one application's database and code.

A Blue Mandate is a content-addressed executable document with exact participants, target, constraints, validation, lifecycle, provider-backed events, and state lineage.

Three roles#

• Authority holder — controls the authority being delegated.
• Authorized actor — receives the bounded authority.
• Mandate guarantor — confirms that the declared authority relationship is legitimate.

Each role is represented by a Timeline Channel. The Mandate can therefore combine providers appropriate to those roles.

Lifecycle#

A typical lifecycle is:

Pending → Authority Confirmed → Active → Terminated

Confirmation and activation are different. A relationship can be legitimate but not yet usable. A condition such as payment authorization, an effective Agreement, compliance approval, or a document event may activate a confirmed Mandate later.

The authority holder and guarantor can terminate through the standard path. Custom policies may request termination. Lifecycle state writers remain centralized in the base Mandate behavior.

Exact state at the action time#

The feeder must resolve the exact processed Mandate state at the candidate entry timestamp. It must not trust the initial document, a caller-supplied Active field, or a cached Boolean without epoch evidence.

A later activation cannot authorize an earlier attempt retroactively. A later termination does not erase an action that was valid before termination.

Operation Mandate#

An Operation Mandate can authorize one actor to invoke one operation through another actor's channel on one logical target document, subject to a static request pattern, BEX validation, actor relationships, and target-state constraints.

Direct authority remains simpler. When the entry already matches the effective target channel directly, no Mandate is needed.

KYA providers#

A Know Your Agent provider is a natural agentic Timeline provider because it sits on the write path. It can bind an attempt to exact agent identity, principal relationship, runtime or credential, target document, channel, operation, request, Mandate, revocation state, and authorization decision.

The safest pattern performs operation-level admission and Timeline recording on the same path. The target feeder still verifies independently.

Explainable autonomy#

Every accepted or denied agent action should answer: which agent, which provider, on whose behalf, which Mandate, what state at the timestamp, which constraint matched or failed, what target state was used, and what changed.