Paylogee Machine Authority Specification (PMAS) 1.0 Release Candidate 1

PMAS is an open technical specification for expressing, attenuating, evaluating, revoking, consuming and proving delegated Machine Authority. It is a release candidate, not an accredited certification standard.

Core invariant

A machine may exercise authority delegated to it and may attenuate that authority. It MUST NOT manufacture or amplify authority. For every child delegation C and parent authority P, C MUST be a subset of P across action, resource, counterparty, environment, rail, currency, value, usage, validity, state and subdelegation dimensions.

Runtime separation

PMAS defines authority artifacts and verification semantics. The Paylogee Machine Authority Kernel is the reference runtime implementation. The Universal Authority Gateway remains the sole canonical Paylogee decision engine and returns only APPROVE, REQUIRE_APPROVAL or DECLINE. Execution rails consume decisions; they do not create them.

Lifecycle

Identify -> Delegate -> Constrain -> Evaluate -> Approve -> Execute -> Prove.

Portable artifacts

Authority Envelope; Delegation Proof; Action Request; Authority Decision; Approval Proof; Revocation Event; Machine Authority Proof; Commerce Receipt Binding.

Interoperability

Protocol adapters MAY normalize MCP, A2A, x402, Virtual Card and future transport-specific inputs into PMAS Action Requests. An adapter MUST NOT become an authority engine, silently expand scope, or execute a rail merely because normalization succeeded.

Compatibility

RC1 preserves the PMAS 0.1 authority semantics. The RC schemas use pmas_version: 1.0-rc1; implementations MAY continue accepting 0.1 during migration.