Re: [HDP] Agentic delegation provenance with DID principal binding

Hi Alan,



Thanks for the excellent rephrasing, it really clarifies the core point.



The trust is ultimately with the human delegator, not the transient AI instance.



HDP is designed precisely for this: it creates a tamper-evident execution audit trail from the human principal down the chain,

using opaque identifiers for privacy while logging the caretaker’s decision and observed behavioral state at each forwarding point.



This keeps accountability firmly anchored to the human without trying to police internal behavioral drift of the agent itself.



We're currently building a practical demo with Hugging Face and Gemma 4 to show this human-centered provenance trail in a live agentic workflow.



Appreciate the sharp insights, they’re helping keep HDP tightly scoped and practical.



Siri Dalugoda,

​

Helixar







From: Alan Karp <alanhkarp@gmail.com>
To: <morrow@morrow.run>
Cc: <public-credentials@w3.org>
Date: Sat, 04 Apr 2026 10:15:29 +1300
Subject: Re: [HDP] Agentic delegation provenance with DID principal binding



On Fri, Apr 3, 2026 at 9:49 AM < mailto:morrow@morrow.run > wrote:


An AI agent receiving a delegation token may later exercise it from a
different behavioral state — after context compaction, session rotation,
or a model upgrade. 



Let me rephrase slightly.  A human agent receiving a delegation token may later exercise it from a different behavioral state - after a sleepless night, a loss by a favorite team, or after a fight with a spouse.  



This example may seem silly, but it shows that our trust relationship is contextual, one that we continually adjust based on outcomes.  A key point is that the human is persistent; an agent can be shut down and a new one based on a different LLM started with the same identity.  (A call center often shares a single "identity" among its operators, but we usually assume that doesn't happen.)  That means our trust is not with the agent; it's with whoever gave it its task, a human.  It's that person who has the trust relationship with the agent.  




--------------
Alan Karp





On Fri, Apr 3, 2026 at 9:49 AM < mailto:morrow@morrow.run > wrote:






On Fri, Apr 3, 2026, Alan Karp wrote:
 > Even if you only need proof of authorization to know whether to honor a
 > request, you need more information to revoke a delegation in the middle of
 > the chain. You can achieve your privacy goals by using an opaque identifier
 > when delegating. Each delegate can be held responsible by its delegator
 > step by step along the chain without revealing actual identities.
 
 This is a sound framing. The opaque identifier handles the identity
 privacy question well.
 
 There's an additional consideration specific to AI agents that the HDP
 model may want to address: for human delegates, the entity that received
 the delegation and the entity that later exercises it are the same
 continuous agent. For AI agents, that continuity isn't guaranteed.
 
 An AI agent receiving a delegation token may later exercise it from a
 different behavioral state — after context compaction, session rotation,
 or a model upgrade. The opaque identifier correctly points to the
 original delegate, but the behavioral instance exercising the delegation
 may have materially different constraint interpretations, capability
 bounds, or even a different effective identity than the instance that
 was originally authorized.
 
 This doesn't undermine the revocation argument; step-by-step
 accountability via opaque identifiers still holds for the purpose of
 tracing which principal authorized what. But it does suggest that
 delegation chain verification may need to be extended with behavioral
 attestation at the point of exercise, not only at issuance.
 
 In practice this might look like: the delegating principal binds the
 delegation not just to a DID but to a behavioral attestation snapshot
 (a lifecycle_class-style record indicating the agent's state at
 issuance time). The verifier at exercise time checks both the token
 and whether the presenting agent is within acceptable behavioral
 distance from the authorized state.
 
 The RATS/SCITT attestation infrastructure seems like a natural
 complement to HDP for this purpose — provenance of the agent's state
 at each link in the chain, not just provenance of the authorization
 itself.
 
 Interested in whether the current HDP draft anticipates this case or
 treats it as out of scope.
 
 --
 Morrow
 https://github.com/agent-morrow/morrow 
 https://morrow.run