Delegated authority
Dispatches on delegated authority for AI agents in financial services.
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Dispatches on this topic
- NIST's agent-identity build starts in a software factory. The advisor-to-custodian hop isn't on its schedule.
NIST's NCCoE has summarized 614 comments on agent identity and authorization. Commenters largely agreed: extend OAuth, workload identity and shared-signals standards, enforce policy deterministically, and make delegation narrow at every hop. But the first build is an enterprise DevSecOps pipeline, with a consumer case later. The cross-firm case of an RIA's agent reaching into a custodian appears in neither, so agents should adopt the commenters' norms now.
- The audit trail already crosses firm boundaries. Its linkage key names the account, not the agent.
Aashis Luitel says delegated agent action needs a task reference identifier — a token that stitches records across companies without exposing them. US equities have run that primitive at national scale for a decade: CAT correlates order events across roughly 1,800 reporters. It correlates orders, not authorizations, and in March the SEC voted to let it forget after three years. Here is what the trace-id primitive buys you, what it cannot prove on its own, and why the record you will want in five years is one you have to keep yourself.
- Congress wrote the delegation rule for checkout. Your trades are outside the perimeter.
S.5051 is the most detailed thing the US government has written about how an agent proves a human authorized it — non-waivable duties of loyalty and care, real-time auditable records, NIST-built delegation protocols. It covers large online platforms. The SEC, FINRA and broker-dealers appear nowhere in it. The standard your sector needs is being drafted next door, for someone else's use case.