Use case 4 · Chief AI Officer / CISO
Agent authority is not a first-hop checkbox. It has to be computed at every hop.
No agent exceeds the human it works for — at hop one or hop four. The Chief AI Officer ships without a security veto.
Agents hand work to agents to tools, three and four hops deep, and the last hop runs with whatever authority leaked down the chain. ConteXengine recomputes effective scope on every call and bounds it by the human the chain works for.
- Bounded at every hop
- Revoke the parent, the chain dies
- Decided past hop four
The problem
Delegation chains are routine
Agents calling sub-agents calling tools. Nobody computes what the last hop is actually allowed to do.
First-hop checks are a checkbox
The market checks the first call and stops. The chain is the exposure.
The standards layer doesn't help yet
Competing delegation drafts, none adopted. Your agents are running now.
How it works
The human sets the ceiling
Effective scope is the agent's own grants intersected with the delegating person's computed reach.
Recompute on every call
Each hop narrows. Authority can only shrink down a chain, never widen.
Deny with the reason
At hop four the verdict is still computed — with the reason attached, on the ledger.
Revoke the parent
Every derived grant dies with it. No sweep, no timer.
Why ConteXengine
Past hop one
Scope is recomputed beyond the first call — the capability the field and the standards bodies have not solved.
The graph is the chain
No policy describes the chain; the delegation graph is the chain, and the ceiling is a person.
Agents are identities
Every agent has an owner, a score and a known reach, like a person or a key.
Common questions
What is a human ceiling?
The computed reach of the person an agent ultimately works for. No agent, at any hop, can exceed it.
Does this require changing our agent framework?
No. ConteXengine is the authorization call the framework makes. It sits above agent platforms, copilots and homegrown chains alike.
What happens when a sub-agent is compromised?
Its scope is already bounded by the chain above it, and revoking the parent kills every grant derived from it.
How do agents get discovered?
From the signals already in your estate — registries, cloud IAM, logs — and registered as identities with an owner and a credential state.
Can we see the chain?
The ledger records each hop's verdict with the delegating human's ceiling. The console shows the task plan with permits and the ceiling deny side by side.
Go deeper
Give every identity exactly the authority its risk earns. Take it back the instant that risk changes. Prove both.
Runs in your environment
Deployed inside your boundary, including isolated networks. Your data stays where it is.
No AI in the decision path
Models help us build and tune. Every live verdict is deterministic and replayable.
Built and run with you
A build partner connects your estate, then a 24×7 global command center runs it with you.
Patent pending
A new approach to runtime authorization for the agentic enterprise.