Passport and delegation as MCP trust primitives

Connect an MCP client without thinking about who is acting and you have built a remote shell with better JSON.

HUMΛN’s Passport and delegation model exists so every governed call answers: which human or org, which agent, which scopes, until when — cryptographically, not by trusting the chat transcript.

The hook: the tool that should have failed

An agent “helpfully” calls a workflow that emails customers. The demo cheers. Security asks for the delegation that authorized human_api:… on that org. Silence.

In HUMΛN, silence is a bug. tools/call on the org mesh expects a delegation token. No token, no call. Wrong scopes, no call. Revoked, no call.

Mint, narrow, revoke — from the client

Power-user workflows stay inside Cursor / Claude Code:

Mint a short-lived delegation for the task (CLI human identity flows or MCP passport/delegation tools where exposed).
Narrow scopes to the minimum the task needs — Magic by Default for day-to-day, Control Mode when you pin exact capability sets.
Revoke when the session ends or the blast radius changes — including human delegation revoke patterns documented in CLI.

The Passport is not a login wallpaper. It is the device-rooted identity the delegation stands on. Progressive verification and validity ladder language still apply; MCP does not invent a second identity system.

So that “AI did it” becomes “this principal did it under this grant”

Auditors do not want a screenshot of the chat. They want a chain: Passport → delegation → tool → receipt. MCP is just the wire format. Trust primitives are Passport + delegation.

Scroll-stopper: An MCP tool without a delegation story is a privilege escalation wearing a JSON Schema.

Honest boundaries

Some identity UX still requires a human gesture (passkeys, recovery). Headless minting has deliberate limits. The MCP surface exposes what the protocol allows — it does not pretend Touch ID is optional because a model asked nicely.

Go deeper

Product: Passport, Developers
Docs: CLI identity, MCP integration
Community: Sandbox to production, Org mesh, Provenance from tools/call