Entity contracts
A delegation says what an agent may do. A contract says what two parties have agreed it will do, and it is signed by both.
That distinction carries real weight once agents act on behalf of organizations rather than only inside one.
What a contract binds
A contract binds a provider principal to a consumer principal, and either side can be any kind of principal the directory holds: a person, an agent, an organization, a node, a service account, a device. There is no separate agent-to-agent agreement type, because there is no separate identity model.
| It governs | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Allowed tools | The capability ceiling for work done under this contract |
| Data grants | Which specific grants this agreement covers |
| Clearance | The classification ceiling for the relationship |
| Terms and service levels | What was promised |
| Type | Service level, data access, delegation, collaboration, resource, compliance, or between organizations |
Both parties sign, so the agreement is independently verifiable rather than asserted by whichever system happens to be serving the request.
Contracts reference the durable principal, not a credential, so they survive key rotation. Rotating an agent's keys does not dissolve its agreements.
Multi-party arrangements are supported alongside the bilateral core, with additional parties recorded in their own roles: observer, guarantor, further providers or consumers.
Lifecycle
A contract moves through a guarded lifecycle: proposed, negotiated, active, then one of fulfilled, violated, expired or terminated. The legal transitions are a table rather than caller discipline, and authorization is checked on each move.
When an entity is retired, its contracts are terminated on both sides. An agreement does not outlive one of its parties.
Three places a contract is enforced
A contract that only exists as a record is documentation. These are the points where it changes what happens.
At the dispatch seam
A sub-agent's grant may name a governing contract. When it does, the contract's allowed tools become an additional ceiling on top of the grant's cryptographic one.
The direction is fixed: a contract can only narrow, never widen. It cannot grant a capability the delegation did not already carry, so adding a contract is always safe and never an escalation path.
Four verdicts, and the fourth is the important one:
| Verdict | Result |
|---|---|
| Not restricted | No contract governs this; the grant stands |
| Allowed | Within the contract's ceiling |
| Forbidden | Outside it; refused |
| Unresolvable | The contract could not be read. The call is denied |
Deny-closed on unresolvable is what stops a contract becoming ineffective exactly when the system is degraded, which is when it is most needed.
Down the delegation chain
A child grant's governing contract must equal its parent's. Contracts are inherited, and a divergence is a chain-verification failure rather than a quietly accepted difference.
Without this, an agent could spawn a child free of the agreement its parent was operating under, and the contract would bound only the first hop.
At the door to a shared space
Where policy requires it, joining a collaborative space demands an active contract for the joining entity, checked alongside credentials, grade and quorum. Agreement precedes access rather than following it.
Reading them
Discovery is read-only and deliberately narrow. The cross-entity enumeration is gated on node-level oversight because it spans parties, and it returns compact summaries only: never signatures, never full terms, never service-level detail. The existence and shape of an agreement is a different disclosure from its contents.
An agent's detail view shows every contract where it is provider or consumer, with the capabilities, grants, clearance, signatures and lifecycle state for each, so "what has this agent actually agreed to" is one page rather than an investigation.
Contract lifecycle mutation is not exposed to agents. An agent operates under contracts; it does not negotiate its own. The read surface exists so an agent's obligations are inspectable, not so it can adjust them.
Related topics
- The authority a contract narrows: delegation and authority.
- Where the ceiling is applied: sub-agents and the sandbox.
- The wider governance plane: agent governance.
- The directory both parties live in: the entity model.