Essays

What if authority followed the task, instead of the identity?

I’ve been scratching my head over that question for a while. Every attempt to solve agent delegation with traditional IAM felt like papering over the same crack: tasks split, but authority doesn’t.

Agents decompose tasks.
IAM consolidates authority.
The friction is structural.

I’ve been building Tenuo to experiment with the idea. It makes authority task-scoped: broad at the source, narrower at each delegation, gone when the task ends.

Rust core. Python bindings. ~27μs verification.

A few months ago, I set out to explain how to secure agent delegation with IAM. I ended with an uncomfortable conclusion: it might not be possible at all.

In my last post, I showed that static permissions can’t track dynamic intent. We decompose tasks across agents, but authority stays consolidated. The gap is real.

Today I’ll make some enemies.…

We isolate what an AI agent knows. Context windows. RAG. Memory scoping.

We haven’t figured out how to isolate what an agent can do.