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Delegation chain

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The sequence of agents a task passes through from the person or system that started it. It is governed so that each hop authenticates as itself, scope narrows or stays equal but never widens, the purpose travels with the task, depth and fan-out are bounded, and one trace spans every hop.

Developed in
ch. 23, Accountability across hops
Chapters
ch. 23, AI Agents
Contrast with
Delegation (OAuth token exchange)
Source
Defined by this Body of Knowledge: the section it is developed in is the source

Where it is used

One chapter of the Body of Knowledge uses the term. Each link opens the first section that does.

  • Transaction token (Txn-Token)

    A short-lived, signed token, specified in an IETF OAuth working group draft, that carries user identity, workload identity and authorisation context through a…

Sources

No external source: the term is coined or used in a specific sense by this Body of Knowledge, and the section linked under "Developed in" is its source.

Definitions of legal terms paraphrase the cited text, which governs. Dated statements are as of .

Cite this term

García Aibar, J. (2026). Delegation chain. In AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis & Body of Knowledge (v0.5.0), Glossary. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22956197. https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/delegation-chain. CC BY 4.0

BibTeX

@misc{aige2026delegationchain,
  author  = {Jorge García Aibar},
  title   = {{Delegation chain}},
  note    = {Glossary, AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis \& Body of Knowledge, version 0.5.0},
  year    = {2026},
  doi     = {10.5281/zenodo.22956197},
  url     = {https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/delegation-chain}
}