# Revocation

> The ability to instantly kill an agent's authority. The off switch. If you cannot revoke in one move, you do not control the agent.

Category: governance

Revocation is the power to pull an agent's authority immediately and completely. Not a redeploy, not a config change that propagates eventually. One move, effective now.

## Why it matters
Every agent needs a shutdown path, and most do not have a real one. When an agent starts misbehaving at 3am, the question is not whether you noticed. It is whether you can stop it before it finishes. If revocation takes a meeting, you never had control.

## In practice
Authority is granted as something you can withdraw: a token, a scope, a key that the runtime checks on every action. Revoke it and the next action fails closed. The agent does not get a vote.

## Where it shows up in my work
governable-ai.com treats revocation as a required primitive alongside authority and lineage. Grantable, inspectable, killable. The Field Manual calls the missing version of this a kill-switch you do not actually have.

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Source: https://ryanhunter.io/lexicon/revocation
Part of the Agent Infrastructure Lexicon by Ryan Hunter. https://ryanhunter.io/lexicon