Accountability follows the identity the action was taken under. A governed service identity gives an agentic deployment its own scoped credentials, so the record names the service that acted and the person who authorised the work as separate parties.
Akka propagates that identity through every hop of the work. The delegation chain from the person to the agent to any sub-agent to the tool is embedded in the interaction record at the moment the action executes.
Person-attached tools inherit a user identity and stop when the session closes. Claude Code, Copilot and Glean work that way, and a specific human is driving each session while it runs.
An unattended process has no session and no driver. The work runs overnight, resumes after a deployment, and calls tools for a person who is not present. Every one of those calls appears in the access log as an action that person took.
Scoping credentials to the service separates the two parties. The service holds permissions granted to the service, and the person who authorised the run appears in the record as the authoriser.
A gate tied to whoever triggered a run behaves differently depending on who triggered it. Credentials with wide approval rights clear gates that narrower credentials stop, and an agent doing identical work inherits whichever set it was handed.
Akka ties policy gates to the service, so the approval a deployment must clear is a property of the deployment. A run started by anyone reaches the same gate, and the record shows the gate ran.
The audit trail is centralized on the service identity. Every action the deployment took is queryable in one place, whoever started each run.
The delegation chain names the person at the top of it. Human authorisation and the service that acted under it are separate entries in the record.
The chain extends by one hop and the tool call carries the whole chain. Effective permissions are resolved at each hop, so a sub-agent cannot exceed the authority delegated to it.
The identity, the permissions and the policy bindings exist at the moment of execution inside the runtime that propagated them. A component receiving a copy of the interaction afterwards receives the content without the authority.
A service account supplies credentials. A governed service identity supplies credentials, the delegation chain behind each use, the permissions resolved at execution, and the policy gates the deployment must clear.
The interaction record for that decision carries the acting identity, the delegation chain behind it, the permissions in force, and the guardrail verdicts that applied. The answer is read from the record for that run.
