Authority Envelope
The machine-enforceable expression of an authority grant — the runtime boundary beyond which an agent halts or escalates rather than proceeds.
Why it matters
A grant stated in a policy document is a preference. An envelope is the same grant expressed where it can actually stop execution. The distinction matters because every published framework requires bounded autonomy and none specifies where the bound lives.
This term is a QIS Canonical Extension. It does not currently appear in the Model Context Protocol specification, the A2A specification, the AIEOG Shared AI Lexicon, or any instrument in our standards register. We are proposing it because we have documented the gap it fills, and we label it as ours everywhere it appears. Adopt it, argue with it, or ignore it — but do not cite it as industry consensus, because it is not.
What it is not
These are routinely confused with Authority Envelope. The distinctions are not pedantic — each one has consequences for how a system is governed.
The grant is the instrument. The envelope is its enforcement. A grant with no envelope is unenforced by definition.
Relationships
Typed edges into the rest of the ontology. These are what make the canon traversable rather than merely readable.
| Verb | Target | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
implements | Authority Grant | Inverse of implementedBy. The object is a concrete realization of the subject. |
addresses | Authority | The subject speaks to the object as a question or concern. |
escalatesTo | Human Override | The subject hands a decision upward to the object. |
Record
| Canonical identifier | QIS-TERM-00022 |
| Status | QIS Canonical Extension |
| Adoption | Experimental |
| Domain · Layer | Authority · Governance |
| Origin | QIS Canonical Extension. Names the enforced boundary that IMDA's framework and the FS AI RMF both require in prose without giving it a term. |
| Semantic aliases | None recorded. |
| First published | 2026-08-02 |
| Last reviewed | 2026-08-02 · 180-day cycle |
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