ParCor Proof of authority for AI agents
Authorisation infrastructure for autonomous commerce

Observability tools log what an agent did. We prove what it was authorised to do.

ParCor builds the authorisation and evidence layer for enterprise AI agents — a verifiable chain from a board resolution to the transaction an agent just attempted.

The gap

Companies let agents do the buying. Not the committing.

An enterprise can put a thousand agents into production and still cap each of them at a few hundred euros. Not because the agents are unreliable — because nobody can prove the agent was authorised.

A counterparty asked to accept an agent's commitment has no way to establish that a real signatory, at a real company, granted that specific authority, for that specific purpose, and had not revoked it three minutes earlier. So the counterparty waits for a human signature, and the ceiling stays where it is.

That ceiling is not a capability limit. It decides which work a company is permitted to automate.

Mechanism

Authority descends. Scope only narrows.

Every action an agent takes resolves to an unbroken chain of cryptographic grants terminating in a named human signatory and the document that gave them the power to sign. Each hop may narrow what the one above it permitted. None may widen it.

Principal ceiling EUR 5,000,000

The legal entity. Root grant signed in hardware by a named signatory, against the board resolution that confers the authority.

type
root
principal.lei
<20-character LEI>
authority_evidence
board_resolution · document_hash · signatory_verification
signature
ECDSA P-256 · FIPS 140-2 Level 3 HSM · eIDAS qualified
validity
up to 12 months
Delegation ceiling EUR 250,000

A department or programme owner sub-delegates a subset. The verifier computes the intersection of every grant in the chain — a sub-grant that widens any dimension is invalid, not merely capped.

type
sub
parent_grant_id
← root
delegation
may_sub_delegate: true · max_depth_remaining: 2
scope
categories ⊆ parent · counterparty_classes ⊆ parent
Agent ceiling EUR 25,000

The agent holds a short-lived operational grant, refreshed automatically while the authority above it stands, and revocable in seconds when it does not.

grantee.did
did:parcor:<agent identifier>
keys
Ed25519
validity
24 hours, auto-refreshed
scope
max_single_amount · aggregate_window · counterparty_allowlist
revocation
status_list_index · effective within 5s
Action this action EUR 4,180.00

One attestation per action, carrying the full chain and the aggregate consumed before and after. Verification is a pure function of the attestation, the grant chain and time — it consults no mutable state, because it will be run years later, by third parties, possibly in a dispute.

grant_chain
[ root → delegation → agent ]
aggregate_state
consumed_before · consumed_after · limit
nonce
unique per agent — replay is rejected
timestamp
RFC 3161 token · eIDAS qualified TSA
anchor
Merkle root committed every 60 seconds

Illustrative. Field names and constraints follow the Authorisation & Attestation Chain specification, v0.1 draft. Amounts shown are delegated spending authority, in the sense a corporate card limit is.

Properties

What the system commits to.

PropertyCommitment
Maximum delegation depth3
Operational grant validity24 h, auto-refreshed
Root grant validity≤ 12 months, HSM-held
Revocation effective within5 s
Anchor interval60 s
Scope compositionintersection only — never union
Root signatureECDSA P-256 / RSA-3072, eIDAS qualified
Agent signatureEd25519
Post-quantum hedgeSLH-DSA commitment per anchor
TimestampingRFC 3161, qualified TSA
Verificationpure function of attestation, chain and time
Position

A different layer from the platforms agents run on.

Agent platforms

Decide what an agent should do. Orchestration, tools, reasoning, task execution. A vendor's own account of its customer's authority is not evidence about that customer's obligations.

ParCor

Establishes whether an agent is allowed to spend, and who stands behind it. Different layer, no overlap, nothing to rip out.

For business

If AI agents are going to buy from you, they have to be able to check you first.

An agent that cannot confirm who it is dealing with will not deal at all — and an agent that cannot prove its own authority gives you no reason to accept its order. Both problems are the same problem, seen from opposite sides of the table.

We are opening a register of verified businesses: identity checked once and properly, settlement details attested, terms published in a form an agent can read, and able to accept and check an agent's proof of authority. Verified, dated, and re-checked on a schedule.

Registration opens ahead of the first customer deployments. If you sell to companies whose agents are starting to buy, tell us and we will bring you in early.

Independence

Verification that does not depend on us.

A standalone verifier is published as open source, with no dependency on our infrastructure beyond fetching anchor roots from the transparency log. A counterparty, auditor, rating agency or opposing expert must be able to check a chain without our cooperation.

Any verification that requires trusting us is worth little in the dispute it exists to prevent.

Authorisation & Attestation Chain Spec · §8.1