Authority Grant
The explicit, bounded, revocable and recorded instrument by which a principal permits a named agent to commit specified classes of action, up to stated limits, for a stated term.
Why it matters
Every autonomous action is an exercise of delegated authority, and at present the grant is almost never a distinct artifact — it is implied by a tool manifest, an IAM policy, or nothing at all. Naming it separately is the precondition for governing it. The historical analogue is a letter of marque: defined scope, defined term, accountability running back to the grantor.
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 Adopt it, argue with it, or ignore it — but do not cite it as industry consensus, because it is not.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 Grant. The distinctions are not pedantic — each one has consequences for how a system is governed.
The manifest is capability. The grant is permission. An agent can reach a payment API and be permitted to move nothing.
An IAM policy governs a credential's technical access. A grant governs an agent's commercial authority and names the principal.
Guardrails are applied by the operator. A grant is issued by the principal and is the thing an examiner asks to see.
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. |
constrains | Agent Identity | The subject bounds what the object may do. |
notEquivalentTo | Tool Manifest | The two are routinely conflated and are distinct. |
requires | Agent Identity | The subject imposes the object as a precondition. |
Record
| Canonical identifier | QIS-TERM-00020 |
| Status | QIS Canonical Extension |
| Adoption | Experimental |
| Domain · Layer | Authority · Governance |
| Origin | QIS Canonical Extension. Proposed to fill a gap: no reviewed instrument in the standards register defines the artifact that confers permission on an agent, and the AIEOG Lexicon contains no term for it. |
| Semantic aliases | None recorded. |
| First published | 2026-08-02 |
| Last reviewed | 2026-08-02 · 180-day cycle |
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