What is an Agent Delegation?

As agent systems grow more capable, a single agent handling an entire complex task end-to-end becomes brittle and hard to reason about. Delegation lets a coordinating agent break a goal into sub-tasks and hand each to whichever specialist agent — or human — is best suited: a research agent gathers facts, a drafting agent writes the output, a review agent checks it, all coordinated rather than one monolithic agent trying to do everything itself. The hard part of delegation is scope: the delegating agent must pass along exactly the authority and data the sub-task needs, not its own full permission set, otherwise delegation becomes a privilege-escalation path. Good delegation also preserves accountability — the audit trail should show which agent delegated what, to whom, and under what authorization, so a chain of five delegated hops is still fully traceable back to the original task and the human who authorized it.