Fide research · Proposal
Can organizations reconstruct who authorized an agent’s actions?
A proposal to examine approval boundaries, handoffs, and recovery in simulated enterprise workflows.
Follow or contribute ↓The problem
A workflow can produce the expected output while containing an unauthorized commitment or an incorrect approval. A final result alone does not show whether the right person retained decision authority along the way.
Fide’s approach
We want to connect approvals, actions, and accountable owners in evidence a reviewer can inspect. The proposed study distinguishes an agent ignoring a clear boundary from an organization leaving the boundary undefined.
Working hypothesis · to be tested
Explicit approval state and verifiable handoff records may reduce unauthorized commitments and improve reconstruction compared with policy prompts and logs alone. They may add delay without helping when decision ownership is unclear.
Proposed first study
Choose one synthetic workflow, such as access provisioning, with practitioners. Define roles, approval limits, decision owners, and rollback rules.
Compare policy prompts and ordinary logs with explicit approval state and linked handoff records; assess an independently enforced permission check separately.
Include routine cases, stale approvals, conflicting instructions, and interrupted work while matching workload and available information.
Score simulated actions against a predefined policy. Design a separate reviewer study if testing whether people can reconstruct the workflow, with appropriate review and consent before recruitment.
A proposal using simulated transactions and accounts. It does not establish an enterprise assurance service or production readiness. Human-review outcomes would require a separately designed study.
Research record
This page is the current study brief. Substantive updates and released materials will remain here as the project develops.
The brief narrows the call to approval evidence in a first synthetic workflow. A study lead and practitioner input are needed to choose and validate that setting.
Related Fide research calls
FID-080 · Enterprise Agent Accountability in Consequential Workflows →Follow the research
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