Cancelling a long-running agent does not revoke its authority, and a formal cut protocol shows what does

arXiv·medium signalXBlueskyLinkedInCopy link

arXiv 2609.21284 (18 Sep) starts from the observation that long-running agents outlive the process that started them through credentials, delegated tasks, queues, callbacks, reservations and provider-side operations, so cancellation, process exit and credential revocation close neither every pre-cut carrier nor distinguish independently authorized shared work. The paper defines root-scoped authorization quiescence and a protocol that linearizes a root cut, fences old-root expansion and protected sinks, represents alternative and conjunctive authority as antichains of minimal sufficient root sets, and composes provider-frontier certificates into a cutset. A provider-free late-effect suite matches 17 of 17 registered outcomes: two cancellation-only and one cut-only execution accept an already-scheduled late effect, while two cut-plus-fence executions, a restart and a stale-process execution reject it.