W4-012 · Condition 04 — The agent workforce
Delegation chain
A delegation chain is the traceable sequence of grants from an accountable legal person through every agent that acted on their behalf — the structure that makes autonomous action attributable to someone who can answer for it.
Every chain has to end at a person. Software cannot be a defendant.
When an agent causes loss, liability must fall on a legal person, because software is not one. Which person is genuinely unsettled — the operator, the authorizing principal, the developer, the model provider — and no jurisdiction has resolved it.
What a builder can control is whether the chain is traceable at all. Agents that engage other agents produce chains that are easy to lose, and a chain that cannot be reconstructed is an unpriced liability sitting on the balance sheet.
The design rule is simple and unpopular: every chain terminates in an identified accountable person, and the termination is recorded rather than assumed. It costs a field and it is the difference between an incident and a crisis.