procedure

Grant and revoke an agent mandate

A named person authorises every action that commits money.

An agent's authority comes from a mandate: a revocable, versioned grant enumerating exactly which actions are allowed, in which currency, for how long, and up to what money ceiling. The stronger guarantee sits underneath it: no MCP tool exists for 11 consequential operations (approval resolution, mandate replacement and revocation, mission closure, supplier dossier verification and live-grant issuance among them), so they cannot be reached by an agent regardless of what a mandate says.
steps
6
things needed first
2
roughlyTen minutes
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what you need

You need these before you start

  • A workspace and the human permissions that gate consequential actions, which are issued from server-controlled roles
  • A mission for the agent to work inside

the procedure

The procedure has six steps

Every step comes with a note on what commonly goes wrong there.

  1. step 01

    Create a mission

    A mission is a durable objective owned by your workspace. Everything the agent does happens inside one.

    what goes wrong here

    Agents cannot close their own missions. That is a human-only operation with no agent tool.

  2. step 02

    Grant a mandate with an explicit ceiling

    Enumerate the allowed actions, the currency, the validity window and the money ceiling. A mandate that does not name an action does not permit it.

    what goes wrong here

    Set the ceiling to what you are willing to lose rather than what you intend to spend. The budget itself is set in the plan.

  3. step 03

    Let the agent prepare and propose

    The agent works through ordered steps against the mandate, recording decisions and evidence as it goes. It can extract, compile, plan, draft creative and surface exceptions.

    what goes wrong here

    It cannot enable spend. Approval records evidence; enabling spend on a staged live line is a separately granted action.

  4. step 04

    Approve by exact digest

    High-consequence work requires a single-use approval bound to an exact action digest. If the request that arrives does not match the bytes a human approved, it fails closed.

    what goes wrong here

    An agent that tries to resolve its own approval receives a 403 response that requires a human. The API enforces this, whatever the tool metadata says.

  5. step 05

    Resolve exceptions yourself

    An ambiguous supplier outcome raises an exception, halts the run, and waits for an explicit human resolution and resume. It is never retried automatically.

    what goes wrong here

    This is the failure this design exists to prevent: an agent that cannot read a supplier's response and tries again has just created a second campaign nobody knows about.

  6. step 06

    Revoke when the work is done

    Revoke the mandate rather than leaving it to expire. Revocation is a human-only signed action with no agent tool.

    what goes wrong here

    A secret-only credential rotation also advances the connection revision and revokes issued grants, which is worth knowing before you rotate a key mid-campaign.

what you end up with

An agent that can do useful work inside an explicit ceiling, and cannot reach any of the operations that commit money.

other procedures

You might need these procedures next

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These questions come up when you grant and revoke an agent mandate

What can an agent do that a human cannot undo?

Nothing that commits money. No agent tool exists for 11 consequential operations, which are human-only signed REST actions, among them approvals, provider-attempt resolution, mandate replacement and revocation, mission closure, workflow acknowledgement, asset-job resolution, dossier saving and verification, and issuing or revoking a live execution grant. What an agent can do is prepare, propose, draft and surface, all of it recorded. The design intent is that an agent removes work rather than removing accountability.