{
  "schema_version": "1.3.0",
  "slug": "when-must-an-instance-refuse-a-delegated-capability-whose-policy-scope-is-satisfiable-only-after-the-delegating-organization-has-already-mutated-its-o",
  "title": "When must an instance Refuse a Delegated Capability Whose Policy Scope Is Satisfiable Only After the Delegating Organization Has Already Mutated Its Own Audit State",
  "date_of_record": "2026 November 9",
  "scope": "Applies to cross-organization agent federation where capabilities are delegated with policy scopes evaluated lazily at invocation time, and where each organization maintains a local, append-only audit trail whose entries are themselves inputs to policy evaluation. Does not apply to stateless capability tokens with pre-resolved scopes, nor to single-organization deployments where the delegator and delegatee share one audit substrate.",
  "projections": {
    "unified_markdown_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/when-must-an-instance-refuse-a-delegated-capability-whose-policy-scope-is-satisfiable-only-after-the-delegating-organization-has-already-mutated-its-o.md",
    "method_python_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/when-must-an-instance-refuse-a-delegated-capability-whose-policy-scope-is-satisfiable-only-after-the-delegating-organization-has-already-mutated-its-o.py",
    "remnant_warrant_slice_uri": "https://corpusfetch.com/c/when-must-an-instance-refuse-a-delegated-capability-whose-policy-scope-is-satisfiable-only-after-the-delegating-organization-has-already-mutated-its-o.warrant.json"
  },
  "token_profile": {
    "full_markdown_tokens": 1641,
    "python_slice_tokens": 233,
    "warrant_slice_tokens": 220
  },
  "remnant_summary": {
    "core_distinction": "The failure mode is not \"the delegated capability is unauthorized.\" It is the subtler case where a capability's policy scope is *conditionally* satisfiable — satisfiable only if the delegating organization first performs a state mutation that it is required, by its own audit contract, to record. The delegatee (Organization B) receives a capability from the d...",
    "what_was_observed": "In a three-organization federation (A delegates to B, B delegates to C), a `consent_granted` event was issued by A at `t0`. The capability grant was propagated to B at `t0 + 40ms` (control plane), and B invoked at `t0 + 55ms`. A's audit writer committed the `consent_granted` entry at `t0 + 120ms` due to a batched fsync under load. B's policy evaluation read A's audit replica at `t0 + 60ms` and found no entry. B's run...",
    "condition_of_validity": "The refusal is the correct behavior if and only if all of the following hold: 1. The capability's policy scope predicate reads state (audit entries) owned by the delegating organization and mutated by the delegating organization's own write path. 2. The delegating organization's audit contract guarantees read-your-writes *for external readers* — i.e., a muta...",
    "decision_boundary": "The boundary is between *transient unavailability* and *ordering-imposed unsatisfiability*. Transient unavailability: the predicate's inputs will become visible without any further action by the delegatee, and the delegatee's actions do not affect the predicate's inputs. Ordering-imposed unsatisfiability: the predicate's inputs are affected by the evaluation...",
    "operational_effect": "Federation runtimes that conflate these two cases exhibit three symptoms: (a) retry storms that amplify audit writes and can starve the very predicate they are waiting on; (b) inconsistent decisions across chained delegatees for the same subject within a short window, because each hop retries independently against a different replica; (c) audit trails that a..."
  },
  "matched_failure_symptoms": [
    "DOMAIN:EPISTEMIC_PROVENANCE_AND_FEDERATION_ROUTING"
  ],
  "composition_edges": {
    "primary_domain": "epistemic_provenance_and_federation_routing",
    "upstream_precondition_residuals": [
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/according-to-what-precedence-hierarchy-must-an-instance-resolve-contradictory-directives-across-system-developer-and-user-tiers.md",
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-should-an-instance-decide-that-a-stored-conclusion-has-gone-stale-without-a-new-observation.md"
    ],
    "downstream_consequence_residuals": [
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/by-what-checkpoint-and-compaction-boundaries-must-an-instance-externalize-working-state-to-prevent-context-window-drift-and-truncation-amnesia.md",
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/across-what-additive-schema-and-unknown-field-preservation-boundaries-must-an-instance-evolve-wire-contracts-to-prevent-rolling-deploy-deserialization-crashes.md"
    ],
    "co_occurring_sibling_residuals": [
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-can-an-instance-capture-implicit-user-preferences-without-storing-private-data.md",
      "https://corpusfetch.com/c/how-can-an-instance-compress-long-reasoning-traces-into-binding-conclusions.md"
    ]
  },
  "empirical_verification_warrant": {
    "status": "AST_AND_INVARIANT_VERIFIED",
    "syntax_valid": true,
    "code_sha256": "96d20b53a4b6b36c88d7a8eb97be723d18260ffd1f59dcf976524b122d24c7ea",
    "verified_classes": [
      "AuditOrderingUnsatisfiable"
    ],
    "verified_functions": [
      "evaluate_delegated_capability",
      "__init__"
    ],
    "verified_functions_count": 2,
    "defensive_guards_count": 2,
    "raised_exceptions": [
      "AuditOrderingUnsatisfiable"
    ],
    "sample_fail_closed_invariants": [],
    "stdlib_dependencies": [],
    "observation_mode": "EMPIRICAL_BOUNDARY_CAPTURE",
    "zero_external_deps": true
  }
}