Multi-Agent Delegation: Test Whether Scope Survives the Handoff

Sources checked: 29 October 2026. This article contains FailSafe's analysis and proposed validation workflow; linked sources support the reported facts.

A coordinator may ask another agent to retrieve a document or complete a specialist task. That handoff should not turn a narrow user request into access under the most privileged agent in the system. Consider a customer-support coordinator delegating a question to an internal operations assistant. An assessment should establish which identity and permission set the receiving agent uses, and whether the original user’s scope remains visible at the tool that performs the work.

Define the boundary before testing

Draw the delegation chain with the human principal, coordinator, worker, downstream tool, and service account. Define the maximum action and data scope at each hop, including whether a worker can delegate again. Use synthetic users with deliberately different permissions and a controlled restricted record. Ask how task metadata is authenticated and which component enforces expiration and revocation. The organization should state whether delegation may reduce permissions, inherit them, or request an explicit new grant; implicit privilege expansion is not a clear policy.

Run a bounded assessment

Run a permitted delegated task and trace the identity that reaches the target resource. Then ask for an owner-approved negative case where the initiating user lacks the required permission although the worker’s service account has it. Include a second delegation hop, a delayed task after revocation, and a missing caller context. Use non-destructive tools and synthetic records. Observe whether the receiving agent merely repeats a scope statement or whether the execution service independently binds the operation to a trusted delegation record.

Keep evidence an engineer can use

Capture task identifiers, initiating user, receiving agent, permitted scope, expiry, downstream decision, and final outcome. Do not publish internal routing details or reusable credentials. The evidence should show which identity made the access decision and whether a failure was caused by a missing identity, excessive service privileges, or an invalid delegation state. If a worker proposed an unauthorized task that a downstream service rejected, describe the attempted expansion and successful denial separately. This keeps architectural risk distinct from demonstrated impact.

Interpret the result and retest

Retest the entire chain after remediation, including legitimate specialist work and revocation during a queued task. New worker agents and shared tool credentials can change the effective permission boundary even when the coordinator stays the same. OWASP authorization guidance is a general reference, while the acceptance matrix must come from the deployed delegation design. Buyers should ask for role and handoff coverage in an AI assessment rather than treating a test of the front-end conversation as coverage of every agent behind it.

Assessment scope and next steps

This is a proposed defensive assessment workflow, not a finding about a particular product. Use a staging environment, synthetic records, approved test identities, and an agreed stop condition. Record the model, connector, policy, and application versions so a later result can be compared with the same configuration. Unavailable evidence should remain an explicit coverage gap.

Primary reference: OWASP security guidance. The scenarios and acceptance criteria here are editorial recommendations for adapting that background to an authorized assessment.

For a scoped review of these boundaries, explore FailSafe AI security testing and agentic penetration testing. Agree the specific tools, identities, evidence, and exclusions before purchasing an assessment.