Glossary entry

Delegated Agency

Glossary entry in Core concepts. Definitions, checks, and evidence for Delegated Agency.

Quick takeaways

The capacity to act with consequence on an institution's behalf, held by a machine, a human, or an assembly of both.

Definition
Minimum evidence
Operational tests

Definition

The capacity to act with consequence on an institution's behalf, held by a machine, a human, or an assembly of both. Delegated agency is created by an authority grant and exercised through a decision system; it is not a property of the model that happens to be running.

It matters because agency is the quantity that accumulates. An institution that tracks capability but not delegated agency cannot say how much of its consequential action it has handed over, or whether it still holds the correction capacity to take any of it back. Agency handed over under a revisable delegation can be taken back one grant at a time; agency handed over without one comes back only by rebuilding what replaced it.

AgencyStructural

Scale: Organizational · Phases: Design, Deployment · Measurability: Semi-quantitative · Maturity: Core concept

Scope: A. Core concepts. These terms define the Ethotechnics discipline itself and set expectations for moral system design.
Genealogy: Names the object the twelve laws govern: not the model, but the agency an institution has handed to it.

Adjacent terms

Authority Grant Decision System Correction Capacity Revisable Delegation

References

Laws for engineering delegated intelligence · Doctrine

Glossary territory

These terms define the Ethotechnics discipline itself and set expectations for moral system design.

Explore Core concepts in the glossary index.

Entry details

Last updated: 2026-09-18
Term version: v1.4.0
Changelog: View updates

Extended routes

Supplementary links and diagnostics for deeper review.

Operational tests (3)

The institution can list, for one workflow, every action class a machine may take on its behalf.
Each listed action class traces to a named grant holder rather than to a team or a system name.
Growth in delegated action classes over a quarter is reported alongside growth in correction capacity.

Minimum evidence checklist

Artifact: A register of action classes a machine may perform on the institution's behalf, with holders.
Behavior: A new action class appearing only after an authorization decision, visible in the register history.
Metric: Count of authorized action classes per workflow, tracked against correction capacity over time.

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Cite this glossary entry Formats: APA, MLA, Chicago, BibTeX, RIS

Version

v1.4.0

Last updated

Sep 18, 2026

Permalink

https://ethotechnics.org/glossary/delegated-agency

DOI

Pending Zenodo deposit

APA

Ethotechnics Institute Research Team. (2026). Delegated Agency. Ethotechnics glossary. https://ethotechnics.org/glossary/delegated-agency

MLA

Ethotechnics Institute Research Team. "Delegated Agency." Ethotechnics glossary, 2026, https://ethotechnics.org/glossary/delegated-agency.

Chicago

Ethotechnics Institute Research Team. "Delegated Agency." Ethotechnics glossary. Sep 18, 2026. https://ethotechnics.org/glossary/delegated-agency.

BibTeX

@misc{glossary_delegated-agency,
  title={Delegated Agency},
  author={Ethotechnics Institute Research Team},
  year={2026},
  howpublished={Ethotechnics glossary},
  url={https://ethotechnics.org/glossary/delegated-agency},
  version={v1.4.0}
}

RIS

TY  - WEB
TI  - Delegated Agency
AU  - Ethotechnics Institute Research Team
PY  - 2026
UR  - https://ethotechnics.org/glossary/delegated-agency
ER  -

Scholarly metadata

Authorship

Ethotechnics Institute Research Team · Ethotechnics Institute · research@ethotechnics.org

Contact: research@ethotechnics.org

Publication details

Published: Dec 3, 2025
Last updated: Sep 18, 2026
Version: v1.4.0
DOI: Pending Zenodo deposit

License: CC BY-SA 4.0

Credit Ethotechnics Institute, include the term title + version, and link to the glossary permalink.

Archive: Wayback Machine history

Changelog

v1.7.0 · 2026-09-18 — Added Non-Finality, Consequential Contradiction, and The Excluded Case, and generalized the falsified denominator into the falsified ledger — completing the five concerns and the fallibilist ground they stand on.
v1.6.0 · 2026-09-18 — Added Human Non-Substitutability, Safe Incompleteness, Anti-Conversion Rights, Abstention, Constitutional Debt, Discretion Migration, and Corrigibility Rent — the person-side principles, the three abstentions, and the rent concept.
v1.5.0 · 2026-09-18 — Added Exception Absorption, Exception Learning, Case Corrigibility, Structural Corrigibility, Institutional Learning, Corrective Debt, and the Workaround Presumption, formalizing the historical turn: reading institutions through their failure trajectories rather than their stated controls.
v1.4.0 · 2026-09-18 — Added Residual Complexity, Complexity Displacement, Falsified Denominator, Closure Without Remainder, Constitutional Governance, and Post-Optimization Rigor, embedding the foundational contention of burden redistribution.
v1.3.0 · 2026-09-11 — Added Attestation, Liability Record, Carve-Out, Delegation Chain, Composed Latency, and Silent-Harm Discovery, each bound to the standard clause that requires it.
v1.2.0 · 2026-09-08 — Added The Non-Conversion Principle, Exit Cost, and Jurisdictional Path Dependence, each linked to the theory essay that argues for it.
v1.1.0 · 2026-01-09 — Expanded scholarly metadata, operational tests, and provenance notes.
v1.0.0 · 2025-12-03 — Initial glossary release with stable permalinks.

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Delegated Agency