Delegation Chain

A delegation chain is the sequence of parties acting on a user's behalf as a request passes from one to the next: for example a user delegates to an AI agent, which calls a tool, which calls an API. Each hop should be recorded, and each hop should only be able to narrow the authority it received, never widen it.

OAuth can record a chain but not enforce one. RFC 8693 token exchange lets a token carry nested act claims naming each prior actor, then states that those prior actors "are informational only and are not to be considered in access control decisions". SWI's Agent Identity Standards Map 2026 therefore scores chained delegation as only drafted: identity chaining handles one cross-domain hop at a time, Transaction Tokens carry context inside one trust domain, and the OAuth working group's Delegate SD-JWT draft targets agent delegation directly. The practical pattern today is a token exchange at every hop, down-scoped each time, with the full act chain logged and each hop enforcing its own policy. Forwarding the original token downstream, the opposite, is how scope escalation through delegation happens.

See also: token exchange, identity chaining, Transaction Tokens, ID-JAG and Cross App Access, agentic identity, securing AI agent identities