Attribution
Tracing every agent action back through the agent identity to the accountable human who owns it.
Attribution is the ability to tie any agent action to the specific agent that took it and the human who owns that agent. It’s what turns “the system did something” into “Maya’s billing agent attempted a $40 refund at 14:02, allowed under the Billing role.”
Attribution is the property raw API keys destroy. A bearer key is anonymous by design: the upstream API sees a valid, authenticated call and nothing more. When the audit question comes — who initiated this transfer? — the honest answer is “a key,” not an agent, not a person, not a reason. Everything looks fine precisely because, to the API, the request was valid.
A control plane restores attribution by giving each agent its own identity and recording, for every action, the agent, its owner, the role under which it acted, and the run that led there. The upstream system stops seeing a faceless service account and starts seeing an accountable chain.
Attribution is the backbone of an audit trail and of every compliance conversation. Auditors don’t ask “did an action happen” — they ask “who’s accountable for it.” Without attribution you can’t answer; with it, accountability for an autonomous system becomes as legible as accountability for an employee.
Related terms
Log / audit trail
The immutable, attributable record of every agent action — allowed and denied — recorded in the path as it happens.
SIEM (security information & event management)
The system your security team uses to collect, correlate, and alert on logs — including your agent audit trail.
Agent control plane
The layer in the path of every agent action that decides, enforces, and records what each agent can do.
Blast radius
The total damage an agent could do if it's compromised, prompt-injected, or simply wrong.
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