Counterparty Mandate

The portion of an Encoded Mandate an agent carries across an organisational boundary and presents to another business's Machine-Readable Interface: a machine-readable statement of what the agent is permitted to do at this counterparty — enquire, quote, reserve, commit, spend, and to what limits, on whose authority, and whether that authority is still live — so that the receiving system can enforce a boundary the sending system declared.

Inside one business an Encoded Mandate is enforced by the layer that mediates the agent's calls. In an Agentic Market the agent's calls land on another business's Machine-Readable Interface, and that layer is on the wrong side of the boundary. The operator controls what the agent is permitted to do; the counterparty controls what happens when the agent asks; neither can see the other's half. The Counterparty Mandate is the part of the mandate that has to travel, so that enforcement moves to the party that can perform it — the receiver, which owns the state and can decline to change it — and that party has a statement to enforce against.

The term completes a triad the corpus built two-thirds of. The Declaration Layer says what a business's vocabulary means, delivered before an agent reads any content. The Machine-Readable Interface says what an arriving agent may discover, evaluate and transact. Both are declared outward, to agents arriving at a business's door, and both exist because an agent meeting an unexpected structure resolves the mismatch itself and produces a wrong result. The Counterparty Mandate is the same move from the arriving agent's side: this is what I am permitted to do here, on whose authority. Without it the receiving system is in the position the Declaration Layer was built to eliminate — guessing — and today it resolves the guess by treating a request as authorised because it arrived.

What it carries is the mandate's dimensions scoped to the counterparty. Actions permitted here, on a ladder the market memos imply: enquire, quote, reserve, commit. Resources, as limits: quantity, spend, duration. Identity, resolved: which operator the agent acts for, verifiable by the receiver rather than asserted by the agent. And revocation: whether the authority is still live, so that an agent whose operator withdrew it cannot present a mandate that says otherwise. Each is enforced at the receiving interface, on the call, in the same act as the market state is updated, which gives a commitment made in an Agentic Market a provenance on both sides of the boundary.

The Counterparty Mandate composes with Round-Trip Commit rather than duplicating it. The Steward's confirmation on the round trip establishes intent — did the human mean this; the Counterparty Mandate establishes authority — is this agent permitted to do this here. A reservation taken by phone is both questions at once, and only the second is one the receiving system is positioned to enforce. Authorisation objects for some of this exist in pieces — delegated-authorisation scopes, signed intents, verifiable credentials, procurement limits, and payments-grade authorisation for spend. None is specified for an agent committing on an operator's behalf at a counterparty it has never contracted with, with limits and revocation checkable at the moment of the call. The object is under-specified for agent commit, not absent, and Arco expects it to be built on the pieces that exist. Arco has built no such object and operates no agents in an Agentic Market; the term is a requirement derived from the market memos and from voice agents now committing state at third parties.

First used: September 2026

Edition 1 · updated September 2026