Authority
The permission under which an actor may bind a principal. In agentic finance, the specific answer to: what is this agent permitted to commit, who granted that permission, up to what limit, for how long, and how is it revoked.
Why it matters
Applies to whoever bears the consequence of the action, which in a fund is the adviser and ultimately the fund's officers — not the vendor whose software executed it. It bites the moment an agent takes an action a human did not approve individually, which is the definition of autonomy. It fails in three ways: the grant was never made explicit, it was made but not bounded, or it was bounded in a document and not in the system. The third is the most common and the hardest to detect, because the paperwork looks correct.
What it is not
These are routinely confused with Authority. The distinctions are not pedantic — each one has consequences for how a system is governed.
Capability is what the agent can technically reach. Authority is what it may commit. A tool manifest describes the first and is routinely mistaken for the second.
Access control governs a credential's technical reach. Authority governs commercial power and names the principal who granted it.
Relationships
Typed edges into the rest of the ontology. These are what make the canon traversable rather than merely readable.
| Verb | Target | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
addresses | Authority | The subject speaks to the object as a question or concern. |
relatedTo | Authority Grant | An association too weak or too general for a stronger verb. |
relatedTo | Consent Grant | An association too weak or too general for a stronger verb. |
Record
| Canonical identifier | QIS-TERM-00025 |
| Status | Canonical industry term |
| Adoption | Widely used |
| Domain · Layer | MARQUE questions · Governance |
| Origin | MARQUE question 01. The concept is ancient in agency law; its application to autonomous systems is unsettled. |
| Semantic aliases | None recorded. |
| First published | 2026-08-02 |
| Last reviewed | 2026-08-02 · 180-day cycle |
Cite the identifier, not the URL. Identifiers are stable; URLs may change. This entry is free to read, quote and index under the dual license. Corrections to [email protected] are published.