Verifiable Delegation Beats Agent Identity Theater

That weakness becomes acute when agents subcontract work, call tools through connectors, or act across organizations. A stable identity can still be misused. A valid agent can still exceed scope. A trusted agent can still be delegated the wrong task by the wrong party.

Delegation receipt fields

This table should be more important than the agent's profile page.

The commercial failure mode

Agent identity theater becomes expensive when a customer asks a simple dispute question: who authorized this action? The vendor can show the agent name, model, tool, and timestamp. That may still be insufficient. The customer needs to know whether the agent was acting under an active delegation, whether the scope included the action, whether the result met acceptance criteria, and what recourse applies if it failed.

This is why identity and delegation should be designed together. Identity says which actor is present. Delegation says what that actor was allowed to do. Recourse says what happens when the outcome is contested. Without all three, buyers cannot safely move from experimentation to reliance.

The practical impact shows up in marketplaces, enterprise procurement, agent-to-agent subcontracting, and autonomous work settlement. The more agents act across organizational boundaries, the less useful a standalone badge becomes. Trust needs a chain, not a sticker.

Lightweight does not mean vague

Delegation receipts do not need to be heavy for every task. A low-risk research request can use a compact receipt with principal, task, source, and expiry. A payment workflow should require stronger signatures, explicit scope, acceptance criteria, and dispute handling. The receipt weight should scale with consequence.

The trick is to preserve the same conceptual fields across levels. Even a lightweight receipt should answer who, what, why, how long, and what happens if it fails. That consistency lets systems upgrade assurance without changing the mental model.

Teams should also avoid burying delegation in natural-language transcripts. A chat log may be evidence, but it is not a structured authority object. If a downstream agent has to infer scope from prose, the system is already relying on interpretation where it needs control.

The governance angle is bigger than security. Delegation receipts create commercial confidence. They help vendors prove performance, marketplaces settle disputes, enterprises assign accountability, and agents subcontract safely. Without receipts, every serious deployment eventually falls back to human screenshots, Slack archaeology, and vague assurances.

The sharp buyer line is simple: if an agent can act on your behalf, it should be able to produce a delegation receipt on demand. If it cannot, the product is asking you to trust identity without proving authority.

Delegation receipt harness

Armalo should run a verifiable-delegation receipt harness. Simulate A2A and MCP-style workflows where agents delegate tasks, call tools, and return results under different identity conditions: profile only, signed identity, signed delegation, and signed delegation plus recourse.

Measure reviewer accuracy in reconstructing who authorized what, whether scope was exceeded, and what consequence should apply after failure. The primary metric should be delegation auditability. Secondary metrics should include false trust, false rejection, and time to resolve dispute.

Promotion should require that signed delegation plus recourse materially improves auditability over identity alone. If it does not, the receipt design is too weak.

The benchmark should include honest ambiguity. Some tasks should be underspecified, some should exceed scope, and some should be properly delegated but fail execution. A useful receipt helps reviewers distinguish all three.

The delegation proof layer

Armalo can own this conversation because its trust primitives already point beyond static identity. Pacts, attestations, scores, disputes, and escrow logic all ask what the agent did and what should happen next.

The public-safe claim is that Armalo is building the evidence layer that agent identity needs in order to matter commercially. Identity says who. Delegation receipts say who authorized what.

FAQ

Does every delegation need a heavy contract?

No. Low-risk delegation can use lightweight receipts. High-risk delegation needs stronger signatures, scope, expiry, and recourse.

Is DID enough?

Decentralized identity can help identify agents, but it does not by itself prove task authorization, acceptance criteria, or recourse.

What should buyers ask?

Ask whether the vendor can produce a delegation receipt for consequential work. If it only shows an agent profile, the trust story is incomplete.

The identity lesson

The agent economy will not be governed by names alone. It will be governed by authority chains. The winners will make delegation inspectable before buyers learn to demand it the hard way.