Agent Trust Evidence Standard
This page defines the evidence tests used to evaluate agent-trust announcements and deployments in the weekly agent-trust.org governance intelligence briefs. Every claim on the standard here is an analytical test we apply, not a normative standard adopted by any external body. If a source uses one of these terms in its own release, that provenance is called out in the brief. When the term is our analytical classification, that too is called out.
Portable delegated authority — required properties
- provenance: delegation signed by principal · subject-bound · audience/resource-bound
- attenuation: downstream authority never exceeds upstream · delegation chain verifiable
- possession: replay-resistant · active instance proves key control
- operator boundary: operator cannot forge principal · cannot exercise subject authority outside grant · custody assumption explicit
- continuity: governed object = authorized continuation of same governed subject · migration/key-rotation verifiable · replicas/succession governed
- temporal state: state-version monotonic every transition · expiry verifiable · suspension propagates · revocation propagates with bounded staleness
Authority-epoch semantics
The authority epoch is a monotonic counter over the governed subject's authority state. It is the mechanism by which a governance system can distinguish revoked-then-reauthorized authority from continuous authority.
Invariant
monotonic
Increment required on
- reauthorization after revocation
- restoration after compromise
- custody-boundary change
- adjudication changing authority
Same epoch permitted on
- temporary pause
- administrative hold
- suspension with trusted possession
Terminal rule
revoked(epoch n) is terminal; any later usable authority is epoch n+1 or greater
Standing-governance limbs
The limbs below are the analytical taxonomy against which weekly evidence is scored. Missing limbs are reported explicitly. Presence of one limb is not a claim about the presence of the others.
- accountable authority
- grounds
- notice
- evidence threshold
- emergency suspension
- appeal
- adjudication
- reinstatement (with new authority epoch)
Operator-independence falsifier
if infrastructure operator controls all signing material required to exercise subject's authority, the system has not established operator-independent portable authority — only portable operator authority carrying an agent label
How weekly briefs cite this page
Each event on a weekly brief is scored against the properties above and reported with its raw event anchor and its analysis anchor as distinct fields on the canonical state at tracker-state://agent-trust-governance. Announced-versus-operational distinctions, reported-versus-primary distinctions, and application-versus-governed-subject scope distinctions are enforced by the editorial guard fields on the state.