Did it succeed is the wrong question. Did it act with valid authority is the one the KYE™ Agentic Authority Index™ answers.

The KYE™ Agentic Authority Index™ is the reference standard from KYE Protocol™ that measures whether AI agents act with valid authority, not just whether they get an answer. It defines the category's measurement layer: ten Authority Benchmark™ metrics, indexed across sectors, jurisdictions and agent action-classes, and published under the Governed Research Rail so every figure is evidence-sealed and replay-verifiable. If you own agent risk, it turns "we think our agents behaved" into a number you can defend — and it launches with the first fully-scored entity: KYE™ itself.

The doctrine: authority is a property, not an event

If you are a CISO, a regulator, or a board member, the Index™ exists to close one gap the agent market keeps stepping over: a task can complete flawlessly and still be institutionally invalid. Each line below is a control you can test rather than a slogan.

  • Approval is an event; authority is a property. A single click yesterday is not standing permission for a different act today.
  • An engineered outcome can still be institutionally invalid. The transaction cleared, the letter shipped, the file was accepted — none of that proves the agent was allowed to do it.
  • "Did it succeed?" becomes "Did it possess valid authority?" The Index™ re-asks every agent action against its mandate, its purpose and its evidence, and scores the answer.

The ten Authority Benchmark™ metrics

You cannot manage what you cannot measure, so the Index™ decomposes "valid authority" into ten metrics an auditor can reproduce. Each is defined once here, in one honest sentence, and each maps to a control the KYE™ engine already emits.

MetricWhat it measures
Authority Resolution™ TimeHow fast the system resolves whether an agent's action carries valid authority before that action is allowed to land.
Authority AccuracyThe share of actions where the authority verdict — allowed or not allowed — matches the true mandate.
False Authority Grant RateHow often an action is treated as authorised when it was not; the dangerous error, because the world already changed.
False Authority Denial RateHow often a legitimately-authorised action is wrongly blocked; the friction error that erodes trust in the control.
Delegation DriftHow far an agent's exercised authority strays from the chain of delegation that actually granted it.
Mandate DriftHow far an action drifts from the specific purpose the authority was granted for under Purpose Permission™.
Policy DriftHow far runtime enforcement diverges from the declared policy as rules, models and agents change over time.
Authority Replay SuccessThe share of actions whose authority basis can be independently re-verified from sealed evidence, without trusting KYE™.
Authority Finality™ CompletenessThe share of consequential actions that reach a proven-final state rather than an ambiguous "probably fine" one.
Human Authority CorrectnessThe share of required human approvals that were genuinely present, valid, and correctly attributed to the right person.

What the Index™ indexes — three axes

A single score means nothing without knowing what it is a score of. The Index™ places every measurement on three axes drawn from existing KYE™ registries, never a new taxonomy, so a result is always "this action-class, in this sector, under this regime."

  • Sectors — the regulated verticals KYE™ already maps as sector packs: aml-financial-crimes, agentic-lending, biopharma-pharmacovigilance, consumer-reporting-adverse-action, canada-health and more, so an authority score is anchored to a real market, not an average.
  • Jurisdictions — the 249 regulatory frameworks KYE™ deep-maps, including the EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 42001, GDPR and DORA, so an authority claim is graded against the regime that would actually judge it.
  • Agent action-classes — the consequential acts an agent performs: moving money, releasing a clinical result, deciding credit, granting data access. Each is scored on its own risk. A chatbot reply and a wire transfer do not carry the same authority weight.

The first fully-scored entity: KYE™ itself

An index that has scored nobody is a promise, so KYE Protocol™ published its own authority posture first — with numbers it computes on every run and can hand an auditor, not numbers it made up. Under constitutional self-run governance (§0.34), every component of the KYE™ codebase is driven through the real KYE™ Decision Engine and must produce a governed, evidenced, replay-stable verdict.

1044 / 1044

inventory items run through the real KYE™ Decision Engine — governed decision, hash-sealed Evidence Pack™, and replay-stable identity. Zero ungoverned.

217

regulatory frameworks each actively emitting an Evidence Pack™ on every run, so jurisdiction coverage is executed, not asserted.

0

ungoverned components — a net-new ungoverned item hard-fails the build, so the score cannot silently rot.

Honest scope: these figures prove the KYE™ engine renders a governed, evidenced, replay-stable authority verdict for an action attributed to every item in KYE™'s own inventory — a real Replay-Proof™ posture KYE™ can defend, not a claim of enforcing any framework KYE™ has not mapped. Source: scripts/smoke/governed-inventory.mjs, verified by the governed-inventory-coverage gate; the day's full scan is recorded in _diagnostics/functional-inventory.json.

How your entity gets scored — a living index

The Index™ launches with its methodology and its first entity, then populates as entities are assessed. It is a living index, published edition by edition through the Governed Research Rail. Every added score arrives evidence-sealed and independently replay-verifiable. Here is how your organisation joins it.

  • Regulators and auditors: each Authority Benchmark™ metric is defined so you can reproduce it, and every published figure ships with the sealed evidence to replay it offline — turning weeks of authority reconstruction into a same-day check.
  • CISOs and risk owners: an assessment scores your agents on False Authority Grant Rate and Delegation Drift against your sector and your regime. Board risk moves from anecdote to a defensible number you can trend quarter over quarter.
  • Builders: bring any runtime, model or policy engine; the Index™ measures the authority above it, mapping each action to the EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF and ISO/IEC 42001 clauses that govern it.

Request an authority assessment Map your chain of authority

Canonical KYE™ surfaces referenced on this page: Purpose Permission · Self-Governance.