The Drift Layer
The Drift Layer is a publication. It holds papers, and it holds the definitions used to measure whether software spending money on a person's behalf stayed inside the authority that person gave it. It is not an organisation, a service or a product, and nothing here is for sale.
The layer this is named for
Whether an agent acted inside its authority is decided, if it is decided at all, above the eventual movement of money — and the payment message visible downstream was never built to record that decision.
That plane is the drift layer: where authority is created, evaluated against a proposed transaction, and, when execution departs from it, either repaired or thrown away. A payment rail records that money moved. It does not record which authority permitted it, or what was checked before it did.
Drift, named precisely
Three different things travel under the word. This publication keeps them apart and does not use drift unqualified.
Behavioural drift — an agent departing from its onboarding profile.
Intent drift — constraints lost while an instruction is interpreted, before any mandate exists.
Mandate divergence — the executed transaction leaving the committed mandate.
Of the three, mandate divergence is the one measurable at the transaction, because the mandate and the committed transaction are both artefacts that can be held, compared, and shown to someone else. It is the sense used throughout this site.
Publications
The archive holds every publication at a stable address, with the version, the licence and the hash of each file printed on its page. The measurement vocabulary is at Four Measures for Mandate Conformance.
Where this sits
Three things, three jobs, kept separate on purpose.
| Specification | Kirby, M. T., Mandate Lifecycle Extensions for Agentic Payment Credentials, Technical Disclosure Commons, Defensive Publications Series no. 11517, August 2026. Frozen: cited, not revised. tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/11517 |
|---|---|
| Implementation | MandatePatch — schemas, type stubs and a canonical commitment function for the artefacts. mandatepatch.org |
| Publication | This site. The vocabulary and the measurement. Open, and it grows. |
Versions and errata
Nothing published here is overwritten. A correction produces a new version alongside the old one, with a dated note saying what changed. The policy states it in full.
Disclosure
A US provisional patent application (No. 64/141,321) was filed on 26 August 2026 and precedes both the disclosure and the repository. The specification is published as Mandate Lifecycle Extensions for Agentic Payment Credentials, Technical Disclosure Commons, Defensive Publications Series no. 11517 (August 2026), under CC BY 4.0. A reference implementation of the artefact layer is published at github.com/MandatePatch/mandatepatch under Apache-2.0. The mechanisms described are one implementation of a more general requirement. Each licence governs what it names and nothing else.
Contact
Matthew T. Kirby, Independent Researcher, River Falls, Wisconsin, USA — matthew.kirby@driftlayer.org