Mandato: Protocol-Level Enforcement of Digitally Signed Mandates on AI Agent Actions with Cryptographically Chained Audit Trails

Abstract: AI agents increasingly act on external systems through standardized tool-calling protocols such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP), yet no infrastructure layer constrains their actions to what a principal has verifiably authorized: authorization logic lives in application code, is neither signed nor independently auditable, and the resulting logs lack evidentiary value. We present Mandato, a governance proxy that enforces digitally signed mandates on agent actions at the protocol level. A mandate is a machine-readable, cryptographically signed authorization artifact specifying which tools an agent may invoke, under which parameter constraints and contextual conditions, for how long, and on whose behalf; the proxy evaluates every tool call against the applicable mandate chain, blocks non-conforming calls in line, and records every decision -- permit, deny, and the evidence for each -- in an append-only, hash-chained audit log designed for evidentiary use and periodically anchored via qualified timestamps. The mandate is deliberately modeled on the civil-law institution of delegation of authority, making the artifact legible to lawyers and auditors, not only to engineers. We give the mandate model and its decision semantics, the reference architecture as an MCP-transparent proxy with separated decision and enforcement points, and a mapping of the mechanism onto EU AI Act Articles 12 and 14, GDPR accountability, NIS2, and eIDAS 2, including a roadmap to qualified attestation through Qualified Trust Service Providers (QTSPs). We describe the implementation status of the reference system and a quantitative evaluation plan covering enforcement overhead, audit completeness, and tamper-evidence verification cost.