---
title: What is actually in one
description: "The four objects inside an Agent Behaviour Policy and the order they come in: the mandate, the grant, the delta and the barrier. Why there is no score on anything here and never will be. And the difference between the free template and the thing that is priced."
lead: "**A grant on its own is an inventory, and nobody acts on an inventory.** This is what is inside the document every level of this store sells — four objects, in an order that matters — and two things the document deliberately does not have."
order: 12
toc: true
---

## What is actually in one

Four objects, and the order they come in matters.

- **The mandate** — what the agent is authorised and expected to do. **Elicited**, because you already know it.
- **The grant** — everything it can actually do. **Measured**, from the deployment shape, the account and the credentials. It is almost never enumerated anywhere, and it is reliably larger than whoever deployed it expected.
- **The delta** — permitted, and nobody asked for it. **Derived**, and recomputed whenever either input moves.
- **The barrier** — what stands between the agent and each capability. Four kinds, and **only one of them is a control**: a setting the agent's own account can flip is not one, because the grant includes the ability to remove it.

**A grant on its own is an inventory, and nobody acts on an inventory.** *Your agent
can do sixteen things* is a shrug. *Your agent can do sixteen things and you
authorised five* is a finding.

## There is no score here, and there will not be one

**The same policy is dangerous in one deployment and harmless in another, and
nothing about the document changed.** The most permissive grant imaginable, running
where there is nothing to reach, is a low risk; the same grant with a production
database attached tomorrow is a different one. Risk is a function of the behaviour policy,
the assets, the consequences and the date — **and the behaviour policy is the input that does
not move.**

So there is no rating on anything here, no traffic light and no risk level. **A
policy cannot be dangerous. A deployment can.**

## The free thing, and the paid thing

**The templates are free and public**, with published read keys, at
riskmandate.ai. Go and read one before you buy anything here. That is not a
generosity and it is not a funnel: a policy nobody can check is a policy asking to
be trusted, and the whole point of this document type is that it can be checked.

**What is priced here is an instance.** The same template with the mandate
corrected, your name on the licence and no public key on it — and at the upper two
levels, the correction done with you rather than by you. **The paid thing is not
access and it is not customisation. It is independence:** at every level more of
the result is yours and less of it depends on us still being here.

{{claim:abp-catalogue-promoted}}

---

This document is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0).