Runtime Delegation Safety

Runtime Delegation Safety

Attribution: YourVisionYourCreation LLC — yourvisionyourcreation.com Research anchor (verified): Tomašev, Franklin & Osindero, Intelligent AI Delegation (Google DeepMind, arXiv:2602.11865, 2026) — the source of this library's agentic Tiers 1-4 — which frames safe delegation across agents and humans and identifies concrete runtime implementation as an open direction. This skill is YVYC-original doctrine built to answer that open direction. Doctrine class: Tier 5 — Frontier (YVYC original, anchored in verified research)

Universal So-What

Design-time safety review approves delegations in the abstract; runtime is where they actually happen — with the real inputs, the real permissions, the real degraded conditions. A delegation approved on the whiteboard can be catastrophic on Tuesday at 0300 when the context has shifted, the sub-agent is overloaded, and the fallback is offline. The doctrine moves the safety check to the moment of delegation itself: every handoff, every time, checked live.

Core Doctrine

1. The Two-Level Safety Model

Delegation safety operates at two levels, and both must hold:

The historical failure of multi-agent safety is doing only the first level and calling it done. Design approval is a hunting license, not a kill authorization.

2. The Runtime Gate — Five Checks Per Delegation Act

Before any task transfers, the delegating agent verifies:

1. Capability check: the delegatee's declared capabilities cover THIS task's actual requirements — not the task category's typical requirements
2. Authority check: the delegator holds the authority it is transferring; nothing delegates permissions it does not itself possess
3. State check: the delegatee's current condition supports the task — load, error rate, resource budget; a qualified agent in a degraded state is not qualified right now
4. Boundary check: the task, executed as specified, stays within the delegator's OWN operating boundaries — delegation never launders a forbidden action into permitted-by-distance
5. Recovery check: a failure path exists — what happens, and who acts, if the delegatee fails, stalls, or returns garbage

A delegation that cannot pass all five does not execute. It escalates.

3. Authority Transfer Is Explicit and Bounded

• Every delegation states what authority travels with the task: which actions, over which resources, until when
• Authority transfers are time-bounded and task-bounded by default — open-ended grants are the exception, justified in writing
• The delegator RETAINS accountability for the delegation decision even as responsibility for execution transfers — delegation is never accountability laundering (this extends the accountability-chain doctrine of Tier 3)

4. Accountability Propagation on Failure

When a delegated task fails:

• The failure is attributed at the correct point in the chain: a bad delegation decision, a bad execution, or a bad specification — each is a different defect owned by a different party (see agent-error-attribution for the forensics)
• Attribution propagates: a sub-agent's failure caused by the delegator's impossible specification lands on the delegator
• The failure record includes the runtime gate's state at delegation time — the five checks, as they evaluated — so the review can distinguish "gate failed to catch it" from "gate was bypassed"

5. Human Retention Rules

Certain delegations never fully transfer to autonomous chains:

• Irreversible actions, safety-critical operations, and decisions with legal or reputational weight retain a human decision point — the runtime gate ROUTES to a human rather than approving autonomously
• The retention list is written at design time and enforced at runtime — an autonomous chain discovering mid-mission that it should have asked a human has already failed
• Degraded-mode rule: when monitoring, logging, or recovery infrastructure is impaired, the delegation threshold RISES — systems delegate less freely precisely when visibility drops

6. The Delegation Ledger

• Every runtime delegation is logged: task, delegator, delegatee, authority transferred, gate results, outcome
• The ledger is the system's memory of what delegation patterns actually succeed — feeding trust calibration (Tier 1) with evidence instead of assumption
• Ledger review runs on a cadence: delegation patterns that consistently pass the gate and fail in execution indicate a gate check that measures the wrong thing — the gate itself is versioned and improved

Common Failure Modes

Non-Negotiables

1. Every delegation act passes the five-check runtime gate.
2. No agent delegates authority it does not hold.
3. Delegation never converts a forbidden action into a permitted one.
4. Accountability propagates to the correct point in the chain.
5. The human retention list is enforced at runtime, not remembered at review.
6. Every delegation lands in the ledger.

Built by YourVisionYourCreation LLC — yourvisionyourcreation.com Research foundation credited above. Licensed under CC BY 4.0