Lesson 11 of 12 · 9 min read

Delegated Authorization for AI Agents

An AI agent acting for a user needs two identities at once: its own, to prove which software is acting, and the user's delegated authority, to decide what it may do. The standard pattern exchanges the user's token at each hop for a new token (OAuth token exchange, RFC 8693) that names the user as subject and the agent as actor, is bound to one audience, narrowed to the task with rich authorization details, bound to the agent's key, and expires in minutes. Resource servers still check ownership against their own data, and high-risk steps get out-of-band user approval bound to the exact action.