When you let one agent act on behalf of another — accept a task, call a tool, spend a balance, hand work to a third — the question you instinctively reach for is can I trust it? That question has no good answer. You can't inspect your way to trust; a capable system that wants to misbehave will pass every inspection you can afford to run, and a benign one will still surprise you the first time it hits an input you didn't imagine. Trust-by-inspection is a treadmill.

The question that does have an answer is the other one: what can this thing do if it turns out I was wrong to trust it? That reframes the whole problem from inspection to bounding. You stop trying to certify the agent's intentions and start sizing its blast radius.…