Who's responsible when your AI agent spawns another agent? Multi-agent authority chains lack an audit trail
Fantastic-Sleep-3352 · reddit · 2026-09-25
A practitioner building multi-agent coding workflows argues that "the agent did it" is not an audit trail. In chains like human → architect → builder → sub-agent → tool, existing tooling (git commits, GitHub PRs, branch protections) can't tell you which agent was acting under whose authority when an action happened.
Key points:
- Was the builder authorized to spawn a sub-agent? Do sub-agents inherit permissions? Who authorized each tool call?
- The author, building a project called SUTRA, believes agent identity, delegation and provenance will matter as much as agent capabilities — and should live in the orchestration/control layer, not in bigger prompts.
- Open questions posed to the community: per-agent identities, recorded delegation chains, and where autonomy ends and authority begins.
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