Liability travels back up the delegation chain until it finds a party that can be sued

The artifact the post is specific about is a credential carrying four things: this agent, this authority, this ceiling, valid until this timestamp ^[9]. That is checkable. At signature time something has to compare the order value against the ceiling and the current time against the expiry, and the second comparison needs a clock both sides accept. The post does not say whose ^[15].

The distinction it wants to preserve rests on one phrase. A contract signed after a credential should have been revoked is, in the post's framing, a governance failure with a specific accountable gap; the same contract signed inside valid scope is ordinary business risk that any human negotiator could have produced ^[11]. "Should have been" is doing the work in that sentence. Revocation has to reach whatever verifies at signing, and the post names no mechanism, format or protocol for getting it there ^[15].

Map the credential fields onto the post's three attribution questions and one of them has no field. It asks, at every hop, who had the authority to decide, who had the information to decide well, and who had a checkpoint where the bad outcome was still preventable ^[6]. A scoped, expiring credential answers the first and bounds the third. In the post's own example the failure sits in the second: a sub-agent called a third-party pricing tool whose output turned out to be stale or manipulated ^[4]. A credential saying the agent could commit up to a ceiling says nothing about whether the price it accepted was current ^[16].

On the evidence itself the post is blunt. A rule that agents do not sign above $X without human approval is worth exactly what you can prove for a given contract: the scope granted, whether the approval gate fired, which credential the agent used, and the timestamp showing whether it was still valid at signing ^[12]. Without that trail, the post wrote, a dispute becomes "a he-said-she-said between the operator's stated policy and whatever the counterparty claims happened, and courts don't resolve that kind of ambiguity in the defendant's favor by default" ^[8].

The legal premise underneath is thinner than the engineering. The post asserts that every jurisdiction that has looked at this agrees liability does not evaporate because the proximate actor was software ^[2], and it names no jurisdiction, statute or case ^[14]. Read it as the author's position.

The post also rejects putting a human in the execution path of every action, calling that a mistake that does not scale ^[13]. That leaves pre-authorization carrying the load. Pre-authorization is only evidence if it was issued before the action, scoped tightly enough that acting outside scope is visible, and checkable by the counterparty as well as the operator who wrote the policy ^[18].