Giving an AI agent permission to spawn sub-agents (without losing control) A reader asked me last week: "If my main agent spawns a sub-agent, what permissions does the sub-agent get? How do I make sure it cannot do more than the parent?" This is the agent delegation problem. It comes up the moment you have agents that work in tandem. A planner that hands off to a coder. An orchestrator that fans out to specialists. An MCP server that calls another MCP server on a user's behalf. The naive answer is: give the sub-agent the same API key as the parent. This is wrong. Once you do that, the sub-agent can do everything the parent can. If it goes off the rails, you cannot kill it without killing the parent. There is no audit trail per agent. You cannot apply different rate limits. The right answer is scoped delegation with revocation. Here is what that looks like.…