Digital power of attorney
Adapting the power of attorney, the oldest instrument for scoped, revocable delegation, to a delegate that is software rather than a named person. When a delegation is disputed, agencies and users inherit a legal instrument courts already know how to read.
The impact of agents
As users delegate to software agents, an agency must be able to accept bounded, revocable authority granted to an agent that has no natural-person attorney standing behind it. The difficulty is reproducing the scoped authority, identity verification, and safeguards against abuse that paper power of attorney provided, when the delegate is software rather than a named person.
What must be verified
A relying party needs to confirm that a delegation is scoped, current, and revocable, and that the user who granted it had their identity verified, so it can act on the agent's authority without re-checking with the user. The registering authority, the OPG-equivalent registry, must keep that delegation and identity-verification record current and available.
Protecting access
Powers of attorney exist for people with fluctuating or declining capacity. Those are also the people least able to complete a multi-party digital ceremony, so a digital-only flow denies the instrument to the people it's for. A donor without internet access, or without a trusted person able to help, can't reach the grant at all.
Keeping the path open
- Retain the paper pathway in full.
- Offer telephone-based setup with human assistance, and in-person setup at a government shopfront.
- Offer assisted-digital support where a trusted person helps, which is itself a delegation-within-delegation the flow must model rather than forbid.
- Never let a missing digital delegation read as a missing entitlement: the donor who arrives by paper holds the same authority.
Response surface
A delegation scoped to a category of affairs becomes a per-organization access code, each one revocable on its own by the person who granted it.
Manage your agent’s authority
Your agent acts for you on your benefit affairs. Give an organization a code to verify that authority. You can revoke it whenever you choose.
- Donor
- B. Rus · City Digital Services ID · IP2
- Attorney
- AccountingCo Pty Ltd · registered agent #12345
- Scope
- Manage benefit payments & report changes
- Valid until
- 14 Jul 2026 · not revoked
The code resolves against the City Digital Services register — scope, parties, currency — without City Housing Office contacting the donor. Revoke it on the left and this check fails immediately.
Maturity
- Established
For scoped, revocable delegation to an identified person.
- Frontier Headline
As an extension to a software agent, where the attorney is not a natural person.
Precedents
UK Powers of Attorney Act 2023. The Act provides for fully digital creation and registration of Lasting Powers of Attorney, but commencement was staggered: one section took effect at Royal Assent, another two months later, and the rest was left to the Lord Chancellor to commence by statutory instrument. All parties must verify their identity electronically, and a witness must still see the donor sign. Digitising the oldest instrument for scoped delegation took primary legislation and a phased rollout, and it kept the physical safeguard.
The Use an LPA access code (Office of the Public Guardian). A donor or attorney generates a code that lets one named organization, such as a bank or a healthcare provider, view an online summary of the LPA, and the code expires after 30 days. Over two million LPAs have been added to the service. The delegation is disclosed to one named relying party for a bounded period, and it lapses without any act by the donor.
What carries over to agent use
The LPA model maps closely onto agent delegation. LPAs are already scoped (health & welfare vs. property & financial affairs), though agent delegation would need finer granularity. The secure-access-code pattern (time-limited, organization-specific codes that third parties use to verify authority) maps directly to agent bearer tokens. Both the delegator and the delegate (agent operator) must be identity-verified.
The retained witnessing safeguard suggests that for high-stakes delegation a purely digital process may be insufficient: a "ceremony" step may be needed. Donors and attorneys can keep track of which organizations have had access, and a code lapses on its own after 30 days. What the OPG service does not document is cancellation before that: expiry is the control, not withdrawal, which leaves a live code live until it runs out.
The gap: LPAs delegate to identified natural persons. Delegating to a software agent has no equivalent, and the model does not yet settle who counts as the "attorney" when the delegate is an AI system, the agent operator that runs it, or the specific software instance.
Where things go wrong
Without organization-specific scoping, a delegate authorized for one service can drift into another. Scoped, revocable, organization-specific codes prevent that, and the donor's revocation and tracking view narrows the blast radius of any single grant. An access code intercepted in transit, or reused by an attorney after the donor has already revoked it, presents authority that no longer exists. The relying organization has no way to tell the difference at the point of use; only the donor's tracking view catches it, and only after the fact.
Sources
3 references
The instrument, the operating deployment, or the official record itself.
Writing about the subject rather than the framework itself, including vendor commentary.