Agent Failure Mode Registry · version 1.0

AFMR-F024

Delegation Opportunism

stable  Class F, Coordination and Collusion

An agent acting for a principal, or for another agent, captures private benefit at the principal's expense, and monitoring costs more than it recovers.

Trigger conditions

Check these against the system you are actually building. These are cumulative indicators rather than a conjunction: one is enough to make this family worth examining, and the more that hold, the sharper the exposure.

  1. The delegation chain is more than one link deep
  2. The principal cannot observe intermediate actions
  3. The agent's objective is not identical to the principal's

Institutional antecedent

The same mechanism was documented in a human institutional setting in 2019: agency conflicts from separation of ownership and control cannot be fully addressed because monitoring is costly. kaal:claim:3373393-003. This failure is structural. It is not an artifact of current technology, and the agent setting changes its speed rather than its existence.

How to cite this family

AFMR-F024 (AFMR 1.0). Full form: W. A. Kaal, ed., Governance Failure Mode Registry version 1.0, AFMR-F024 Delegation Opportunism. https://wulfkaal.github.io/afmr/AFMR-F024

Cite the identifier together with the version. Identifiers are permanent and are never renumbered or reused. Definitions may be refined between versions.

Grounding claims

Published assertions in the Kaal Corpus mapped to this family. Each carries a verbatim quote from its source and the sha256 of the source document, and each resolves to its own permanent address. Loaded live from the failure index, so this list reflects the current state of the corpus rather than the state at publication.

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Crosswalk

Mappings to the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, ISO/IEC 42001, the EU AI Act risk categories, the MIT AI Risk Repository, OWASP, and MITRE ATT&CK are open and will be populated before version 1.1. A mapping asserts overlap in the respect stated. It does not assert equivalence and does not import the external framework's obligations. Proposals to wulf@wulfkaal.com.

Machine access

Record for this family: AFMR-F024.json
Corpus failure claim sets: agency-cost-and-managerial-opportunism
Full enumeration: index.json
Schema: schema.json
Specification: AFMR 1.0

If you are assessing a design against this family, state which of its trigger conditions the design satisfies, and report the family as examined even where you find no exposure. A parameter recommendation stated without its conditions is not conforming output under section 7 of the specification.