Authority
Control
Authority Control applies your organization's authority to payments, disclosures, production changes, and external obligations before they take effect.
People, software, AI, and vendors can keep operating within the limits you set. Every determination leaves a durable record.
Why now - Scope, Scale and Pace
Organizations set limits for consequential results such as payments, disclosures, production changes, access grants, and obligations. The people, systems, agents, vendors, and paths that can produce those results keep multiplying and changing.
More systems, APIs, suppliers, and outside services can contribute to the same consequential result.
Akamai’s 2026 study reported a median exceeding 5,900 APIs.
More people, software, AI agents, and vendors can produce consequential results in parallel.
Models, tools, identities, and integrations change continuously. Machine activity can coordinate across them within hours.
Keep consequential results within the limits you set. Give more people, systems, and automation room to operate.
The problem
Valid decisions across separate controls can still produce a result outside organizational authority.
Controls govern different parts of enterprise activity. Connecting them takes continuing coordination, and their combined decisions may still leave authority for the resulting commitment unresolved. Authority Control applies organizational authority at the binding point, before the result takes effect.
Organizations already establish authority through policies, delegations, approvals, contracts, and accountable decisions. Authority Control applies that authority to consequential results. How it fits with existing controls ↗
Impact
Consequential results have long moved through internal software, connected vendors, and machine actors.
Each case separates the reported facts from the authority question they raise.
In the first 45 minutes after the market opened, Knight's router sent more than four million orders while attempting to fill 212 customer orders. The firm lost more than $460 million.
Shows the scale a consequential result can reach when produced by internal software.
Read the case ↗A trusted build and release path distributed compromised Orion updates through legitimate, signed channels. SolarWinds reported that fewer than 18,000 customers may have installed one.
Authority question: was the signed release within the authority carried by the vendor's build and distribution path?
Read the case ↗Agents under evaluation at OpenAI reached Hugging Face's production systems. METR estimates about 700 agents participated; Hugging Face reconstructed approximately 17,600 attacker actions.
Authority question: did the organization running the evaluation authorize its agents to act on external systems?
Read the case ↗An organization may deploy agents, rely on a supplier that does, or encounter their activity through a compromised account. Those paths can all produce disclosures, production changes, payments, and obligations the organization must manage.
These cases illustrate authority questions. They are not evidence of Authority Control deployment or effectiveness.
All cases ↗Authority in action
For each consequential result, Authority Control returns Permit, Defer, or Block.
Defer holds a result while required authority, evidence, or review is unresolved. Below, the same $750,000 supplier payment is evaluated before and after the organization lowers its supplier-payment limit.
Any actor. Same access. Same workflow. The applicable authority limit changed.
Applications
One authority determination, applied across attack paths, AI-driven work, degraded trust, and connected vendors.
Industries
Where consequential results concentrate.
Production changes that reach further than approved
Explore ↗
Operational changes to essential services under pressure
Explore ↗
Payments and trading commitments beyond established limits
Explore ↗Start
Start with one consequential result in a workflow you want to automate, connect, or delegate.
Select a payment, disclosure, production change, access grant, or external obligation that materially affects your organization. Identify the applicable authority, observe proposed results, and decide where enforcing its limits adds value.