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Authenticated delegation lets an AI agent act with authority granted by a person or organization while remaining identifiable as the agent that made the request. A service should be able to determine both whose authority is being used and which agent is acting. OAuth 2.0 Token Exchange (RFC 8693) provides a published foundation for representing that relationship, but it is not a complete AI-agent security profile; agent-specific approaches remain proposals or working-group material.
Delegation is different from impersonation
In a delegated request, the agent acts for a subject—such as a user or organization—without becoming indistinguishable from that subject. This matters for authorization and for audit: a service can evaluate the subject’s authority and the agent’s identity separately. In impersonation, the actor is treated as the subject within the token’s rights context.
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| Model | What the service should understand | Audit implication |
|---|---|---|
| Delegation | The subject’s authority is being exercised by a distinct actor. | Logs can preserve both the subject and the agent that acted. |
| Impersonation | The actor is represented as the subject within the relevant rights context. | The actor may not remain distinguishable from the subject in that context. |
RFC 8693 describes delegation this way: “With delegation semantics, principal A still has its own identity separate from B, and it is explicitly understood that while B may have delegated some of its rights to A, any actions taken are being taken by A representing B.” The specification distinguishes this from impersonation.
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RFC 8693 defines an OAuth mechanism for exchanging one security token for another. An authorization server can use the request, its configuration, and policy to decide whether to issue a token for a requested resource or scope. The mechanism supports representations of a subject and an actor; a JWT act claim can identify an actor and represent an actor chain.
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That is a foundation, not a complete recipe for autonomous agents. RFC 8693 does not prescribe a universal AI task format, capability model, delegation-depth limit, or policy for every resource server. Those decisions belong to the applicable profile and deployment. In particular, an agent identifier in a claim is not by itself proof that the requester controls the corresponding identity.
A practical request flow
A sound design keeps identity, authorization, and resource enforcement connected at each service boundary. One possible flow, combining RFC 8693’s general exchange model with emerging agent-profile proposals, is:
- Grant bounded work. A person or organization authorizes a defined task, resource set, and level of authority. The system should make clear what the agent may do and whether approval or oversight is required.
- Authenticate the agent as a workload. The agent presents a managed credential bound to its workload identity. Depending on the deployment, this may involve a workload identity such as a SPIFFE ID/SVID and a proof mechanism such as mutual TLS (mTLS) or DPoP.
- Request an exchanged token. The agent or a trusted intermediary asks the authorization server for a token suited to the downstream resource, identifying the subject whose authority is represented and the agent acting as actor. The server applies its policy rather than blindly copying the authority in an incoming credential.
- Validate and authorize at the resource. The resource server checks the token and applies its local policy to the requested operation. A valid token is not, on its own, a guarantee that every action described by a request is permitted.
- Preserve the chain on handoff. If another agent takes over, the receiving service should be able to establish the upstream subject and actor context, authenticate the downstream agent independently, and restrict the new token to the authority actually delegated.
This is an architectural pattern, not a claim that all implementations use identical exchanges or claims. The authorization server decides what it will issue; the resource server remains responsible for enforcing its own access rules.
What a resource server should check
Token claims and scopes only help when the receiving service validates them and connects them to its own authorization policy. The exact checks depend on the chosen protocol profile and deployment, but a resource-server review should cover:
- Token integrity and trusted issuer, plus the intended audience and expiry.
- Whether the credential is bearer-only or requires a proof-of-possession check such as mTLS or DPoP.
- The subject and actor identities, including any delegation-chain data the deployment relies on.
- Whether the requested operation, resource, scope, task, and relevant context fit the grant and local policy.
- Whether the credential or grant has been revoked, where the system supports active revocation checks.
- Whether the action and identity context can be recorded for audit without losing which agent acted for which subject.
An agent-focused OAuth profile called AAP proposes claims for task, capability, oversight, context, delegation, and audit, and calls for resource-server evaluation. These are profile recommendations, not evidence that resource servers generally implement them.
Multi-agent chains need identity continuity and bounded authority
A chain can involve a user, an initial agent, an intermediary, and one or more downstream agents. Each handoff creates two separate questions: can the receiver verify which actor is making this request, and can it establish how that actor’s authority derives from the original grant? Losing either link makes it harder to enforce least privilege or reconstruct an action later.
RFC 8693 provides a general way to represent an actor and notes that an actor claim can represent a delegation chain. Current agent-specific proposals explore additional chain metadata, credential binding, and revocation. Their formats and behavior should not be assumed interoperable or settled. Define operationally how deep a chain may become, how revocation affects work already in progress, how asynchronous consent is handled, and what information audit records retain.
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Do not pass a user’s broad bearer token from agent to agent as a shortcut. Prefer an authorization-server decision that yields a credential appropriate to the downstream resource and the authority being delegated. This reduces reliance on every agent in a chain handling the original credential safely.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How mature are the agent-specific approaches?
The maturity distinction is important: RFC 8693 is published, while the agent-focused profiles and compositions below are drafts, project framing, or meeting materials. Their appearance in a proposal does not establish deployment, adoption, or interoperability.
| Work | Status and date stated in the source | What it contributes |
|---|---|---|
| OAuth 2.0 Token Exchange, RFC 8693 | IETF Proposed Standard, published January 2020. | General token-exchange mechanism, including subject/actor roles and delegation semantics. |
| AAP for OAuth 2.0, draft-01 | Published February 7, 2026; stated expiry August 11, 2026. That expiry had passed by October 3, 2026, and successor status is not established here. | Proposes an OAuth/JWT profile for agent identity, task context, capabilities, oversight, delegation, and auditing; recommends mTLS or DPoP proof of possession. |
| KAIF, draft-00 | Published July 19, 2026; stated expiry January 20, 2027. | Proposes combining RFC 8693, SPIFFE workload-identity attestation, and operator-assigned authorization tiers for bounded cross-boundary transactions. |
| Credential Delegation Protocol for AI Agents, draft-00 | Internet-Draft proposal; the opened draft describes itself as a proposal, not a finalized standard. | Proposes combining token exchange, proof of possession, rich authorization requests, and CIBA for scoped credentials, consent, cascading revocation, and audit chains. |
| NIST NCCoE concept paper | Published February 2026; project framing, not a finalized implementation guide. | Discusses OAuth/OIDC, SPIFFE/SPIRE, SCIM identity lifecycle, and NGAC fine-grained access control in an enterprise identity and authorization project. |
| IETF WIMSE interim slides | 2026 meeting material, not a normative specification. | Shows working-group discussion of workload credentials, SPIFFE SVIDs, token exchange, mTLS, message proofs, and human-in-the-loop flows. |
Decisions to settle before implementation
There is no established performance ranking or interoperability bake-off among these approaches. Compare candidate designs against the boundaries and operations your system actually needs:
- Identity source: Decide whether agent identities come from OAuth client registration, an OIDC issuer/subject, SPIFFE workload identity, or another managed identity system, and define how a verifier trusts that source.
- Credential binding: Determine whether bearer tokens are sufficient for a given boundary or whether the client must prove possession of a key through mTLS, DPoP, or another mechanism.
- Authorization precision: Establish whether broad scopes are adequate or whether policy must also constrain task, capability, resource, and context.
- Cross-domain trust: Specify which operators and issuers are trusted when requests cross organizational boundaries, and what evidence each side must validate.
- Lifecycle and failure behavior: Define credential lifetimes, revocation checks, key rotation, consent delays, and what happens when a grant changes during ongoing work.
- Audit and operations: Ensure records can connect the original subject, every acting agent, the grant, and the resource action; account for the authorization-server and resource-server changes and policy administration this requires.
Threats and limits to account for
Task drift and prompt injection can create policy and system risks, but the cited standards and project materials do not quantify an agent-specific threat rate. An authorization system should not assume that a task remains within bounds just because an agent was originally given a legitimate task. Resource-level enforcement and appropriately narrow credentials provide an independent control when an agent’s behavior changes.
Short-lived, cryptographically bound workload credentials are a relevant design direction in WIMSE discussion, alongside SPIFFE SVIDs, mTLS, and proof mechanisms. Those meeting materials do not amount to a single complete, deployed standard for authenticated delegation between autonomous agents. A production design should treat the chosen profile’s maturity and its behavior across service boundaries as explicit requirements, not assumed properties.
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