Approval Drift

The gradual erosion of authorisation controls as agent systems scale. Over time, it becomes unclear who authorised what, when, and under which policy. The Grid prevents approval drift through cryptographic capability tokens that create an unbroken chain of authority from the original approver to the executing agent.

Unlike model drift, which describes a model's outputs degrading as the world changes underneath it, approval drift is a property of the authorisation system, not the model. The model can be perfectly stable and approval drift will still appear: people leave teams, exceptions become permanent, scopes broaden, audit trails fragment. Capability tokens fix the cause rather than the symptom — every action is traceable to a signed delegation that names its origin, its scope, and its expiry.