Governance and authority
Define who may decide, act, delegate and change an autonomous organization.
#A mandate is a decision boundary
A mandate states the organization’s purpose, available resources, permitted actions and decisions reserved for its owner. It should distinguish the authority to propose an action from authority to execute it. For example, an organization may research a publication topic and prepare a draft while requiring approval before public release. A useful mandate specifies scope, exceptions, expiry and the person or institution responsible for changing it.
#Delegation preserves responsibility
The manager can allocate work without transferring unrestricted organizational control. A worker needs the task, relevant context, permitted resources and acceptance criteria. A reviewer needs enough evidence to judge the artifact without silently inheriting the author’s permissions. In the current AxiomAO model, one local instance has one active manager; workers and reviewers do not acquire management authority merely by receiving a role or reading shared instructions.
#Policy and enforcement are different mechanisms
Written instructions express policy. Operating-system permissions, client sandboxing and mediated tool APIs determine which actions are technically possible. A correct architecture describes both and tests their relationship. If an agent can bypass a mediated API using another available tool, the API’s checks do not constrain that path. Conversely, a broad business mandate cannot grant filesystem or network access that the execution environment does not provide.
#Changing authority is itself an action
Changes to purpose, spending limits, access policy and management ownership require explicit authority and durable evidence. Record the previous rule, proposed change, decision and effective version. Material encountered during research is input to evaluate; it cannot appoint itself a new owner or expand the mandate. Emergency procedures should explain how activity pauses, who can resume it and how already running processes are reconciled before ownership changes.
Sources & context
Reference edition 0.1 · 2026-10-14. Read the editorial method.