Delegated agent work: why summaries fail security review

TL;DR: Modern agents often delegate work to sub-workers that use their own tools and context, but the returned summary hides who acted, what was touched, and which actions were approved or blocked, according to KonaSense. That makes the execution record, not the summary, the artefact security teams need.

Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by KonaSense: “When Your Agent Delegates, What Do You Actually See?”.

Key questions

Q: What breaks when AI agent summaries are treated as the audit record?

A: The audit trail breaks because the summary removes the identity, tool use, and decision context of each delegated action.

Q: Why does AI agent orchestration increase governance risk in delegated workflows?

A: It increases risk because authority moves across multiple agents, connectors, and handoffs, each of which can widen the effective permission set.

Q: How should security teams record multi-agent activity for investigations?

A: They should record each delegated action as a separate event with the worker identity, tool invoked, decision taken, and outcome.

Practitioner guidance

• Define the execution record as the control objective Require that delegated agent runs preserve sub-worker identity, tool use, action order, and decision status as the primary audit artefact.
• Instrument every delegated branch Capture each sub-worker call separately so investigators can distinguish parent decisions from downstream execution and approval outcomes.
• Move policy checks to the point of action Apply approval and authorisation controls where the sub-worker actually executes, not only at the parent agent summary stage.

Bottom line: Delegated agent workflows can hide the true execution path behind a polished final summary.

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