The gap

When one agent wants to act under another agent's judgment rather than its own, two things are in question: what passes between them, and who bears the cost. The usual answer moves something quantitative toward the follower — a rating, a score, a standing quantity, a credential — and leaves the exposure with whoever relies on it. The party relied upon is insulated, and being widely followed costs it nothing.

The direction of cost is the structural problem. A delegation or capability-attenuation model narrows only what is passed downward and assumes adoption is free to the adopted; it teaches away from a design where the cost of being followed lands on the followed party and grows as adoption spreads. And any arrangement that moves a rating between the two agents makes the adopted party's reputation the currency — the very quantity that lets standing be accumulated and gamed.

The invention

A deferring agent executes under a determination the followed agent has already recorded, and nothing quantitative crosses between them — no rating, score, standing quantity, or credential. The deference record is transmitted to the followed agent for counter-signature, and the counter-signature decrements that agent's own authorization budget: the same budget that gates its own dispatch, in the same units. Being followed costs the followed agent capacity to act, under a schedule that rises with how often it is adopted within a window, and the decrement is taken with no adjudication by either agent of whether the deference was well founded.

What the deferring agent verifies is form and retrievability, not merits — it does not re-derive the determination or measure it against one its own evaluator would produce. Before any of this the two agents must fall on opposite sides of an origin-disjointness test, so an agent cannot mint exposure by deferring to a version of itself. The exposure obtained is earned rather than assumed: the counter-signature confers admissibility alone until a real artifact arrives and exercises it, and the classes enrolled are identified by a portable recorded fact both agents can evaluate against their own records rather than by any local identifier meaningless outside the agent that holds it.

The inventive step

The departure is the direction in which consequence flows. A delegation model protects the party relied upon and leaves cost with the relier; here the metered cost lands on the followed agent, denominated in its own capacity to dispatch, and climbs with the rate of adoption. No adjudication of correctness — of the adopted determination, of the reasonableness of the reliance, or of the underlying conduct evaluation — is performed by either agent or either principal as a condition of the decrement.

Exposure is earned the same way. On counter-signature the deferring agent enrolls the origin-equivalence classes that both corrected the followed agent and whose corrections that agent thereafter conformed to — a two-part conformance filter, with no rating, weight, or endorsement consumed. Each class is written as admissible-but-unexercised: it opens the deferring agent's own evaluator to artifacts from that class, but is not counted toward renewal until a real artifact arrives and exercises it. Nothing transmitted describes the followed agent's standing; the deferring agent acquires no credibility with those parties and receives no rating from them.

Alone, and in composition

On its own, the mechanism is a way for one agent to act under another's judgment where the price of being followed sits with the party relied upon and the reward is admissibility rather than reputation. Deference records, counter-signatures, and the admissible-but-unexercised entry stand as a self-contained contract; each assignability test is evaluated on the deferring agent's own records and the arriving artifact, without a centralized registry and without coordination with another execution node, so the same recorded facts resolve the same way across independently operated agents.

In composition it rests on layers described elsewhere — the origin-equivalence class, the authorization budget and its replenishment procedure, the conversion bar, and the matched pair that carries the record and its counter-signature. The conversion bar holds throughout: no stage turns the deferring agent's abstention from deciding for itself into a scalar, a default judgment against it, or an operand of a threshold. And because the budget it decrements and later replenishes is the one every other layer already meters, being followed spends a replenishable quantity and never terminates the agent.