What is a capability lifecycle for AI agents?

A capability lifecycle shows how agent permissions are issued, delegated to a child, narrowed with caveats, and revoked before the next request.

How do caveats translate into customer controls?

Caveats are enforceable limits: tenant, task, route, tool, budget, child spend cap, delegation depth, expiry, and revocation rules evaluated before the call runs.

Why does delegation depth matter?

Delegation depth helps limit governed sub-agent chains. A child can receive narrower authority and reaches the configured delegation limit unless policy explicitly allows another handoff.

Capability lifecycle control

Give an agent a token, hand part of it to a helper, and revoke both

SatGate turns tokens into limits you can check: narrower permissions, smaller budgets and handoff limits for sub-agents, and revokes that stop the next request.

Walk the lifecycle See SatGate governance Read capability-token guide

1. Issue capability

Allowed

Issue scoped authority to the parent agent

Grant authority for one defined job — not open-ended access.

Issue a macaroon-style capability with caveats for tenant, task, allowed tools, budget, expiry, and delegation depth.

Proof event

parent capability created

Visible delegation state

Parent capability

cap_parent_1042

Child capability

cap_child_77ac

depth: 1 / 1

Tenant

acme-prod

only this customer environment

Task

invoice-reconciliation

only this job

Route scope

/invoices/read-only

only this API path and action set

Parent budget

2,500 credits

total spend ceiling

Child spend cap

500 credits

child capability cannot exhaust the parent budget

Child spend used

28 / 500 credits

remaining spend stays visible

Delegation depth

1 child level

limits downstream delegation chains

Allowed child tools

repo_search, invoice_read

approved read-only tools

Denied tools

payment_release, vendor_update

high-risk actions are blocked

TTL

15 minutes

expires with the task window

Macaroons and caveats, translated into enterprise controls

Narrowing becomes bounded authority: what the agent may do, how far it may delegate, how much the child may spend, when authority expires or is revoked, and what proof remains.

Macaroon

A portable credential that carries bounded-authority caveats.

Caveat

An enforceable limit on budget, tool, route, tenant, time, delegation depth, or revocation state.

Narrowing

Making a child capability narrower than the parent. Delegation adds caveats without removing or widening parent limits; gateway policy enforces the result.

Delegation depth

How many handoffs are allowed before the chain must stop.

Revocation check

A revocation control evaluated before the next model, API, or MCP tool call.

Signed receipt

SatGate’s signed record of a refusal or a spend, with the route or tool, the decision and a refusal code, that anyone can check.

Next-request revocation

The token’s history shows the child’s narrower limits and its handoff limit. After a revoke, the token’s next request is refused before it reaches your service.

Try it with your own agents.

Build with SatGate See how rules and receipts work