Why authorization and intelligence must be separated

Statement

A system that both interprets intent and executes actions cannot prove authorization.

When intelligence and authority coexist in the same component, authorization becomes an assumption rather than an artifact.

Failure Mode

Most AI agent systems collapse three functions into one: interpreting intent, deciding actions, and executing outcomes.

When something goes wrong, these systems attempt to justify behavior by referencing internal reasoning, logs, or post-hoc explanations.

None of these establish whether the action was authorized at the moment it occurred.

Constraint

Authorization is a declaration of permission. Intelligence is a process of interpretation.

Interpretation cannot substitute for permission. A model may infer what seems reasonable, optimal, or helpful — but those properties are not equivalent to authority.

When authorization is embedded inside intelligence, it becomes non-deterministic, opaque, and unfalsifiable.

Implication

For authorization to be provable, it must exist outside the system that performs execution.

Authorization must be recorded explicitly, prior to execution, in a form that does not depend on internal model reasoning or outcomes.

Intelligence may act only within the bounds of that declaration.

Boundary

This document does not argue that intelligent systems are incapable of making decisions.

It argues only that decision-making systems cannot also serve as their own source of authorization.