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.
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.