Architecture
Nine components, one deterministic path, from an agent's signed intent to a decision your enterprise system can act on.
Agent
An autonomous AI agent, registered with its own cryptographic identity, forms an intention to take a real-world action.
Intent
That action is expressed as a signed Intent: a structured, cryptographically signed request naming the resource, amount, and counterpart involved. Nothing has happened yet.
Runtime Authority
The Intent's signature is verified, then it's handed to evaluation. This is the orchestrating layer, not a single check -- it's what queries the two components below.
Authority Graph
Answers "is this agent's principal entitled to delegate this kind of action, and to this extent?" -- modeled from the organization's actual governance documents.
Runtime Policies
Answers "under what conditions is this specific action permitted?" -- compiled, versioned rules evaluated against the Intent's actual content.
Decision Engine
Combines both answers deterministically into exactly one outcome: Allow, Deny, or Human Review. The same Intent, Graph, and Policy always produce the same Decision.
Authorization Receipt
The Decision is recorded as signed evidence the moment it's made. Today this is the Evidence Portal's record; the planned evolution is a portable, independently verifiable artifact -- see Authorization Receipts.
Evidence Portal
Where that record is searched, investigated, audited, and exported -- the human-facing layer over every decision the runtime has made.
Enterprise System
Only on an Allow does execution proceed to the actual system of record -- the payment rail, ERP, or infrastructure API the agent was trying to reach in the first place.
Why this is a chain, not a single check
A simpler design would run one function -- "is this allowed?" -- against one rule set. Runtime Authority deliberately keeps the Authority Graph and Runtime Policies as separate components evaluated together, because they answer separate questions your organization already keeps separate: who is entitled to delegate authority (an org-chart and Delegation of Authority question) versus under what conditions a specific action is permitted (a policy question). Collapsing them would mean rebuilding your governance structure from scratch instead of modeling the one you already have.
What's live today vs. planned
Agent, Intent, Runtime Authority, Authority Graph, Runtime Policies, the Decision Engine, and the Evidence Portal are the live system -- every Intent submitted today passes through exactly this path. Authorization Receipts, as a portable artifact independent of the Evidence Portal's database, are planned architecture, not yet shipped -- see Authorization Receipts for exactly what exists today and what's still direction.