Operator Execution Identity
Operator execution identity means that every operator attached to an execution-state object — whether an AI agent, a human at a CLI, or an automation process — operates under the same execution-authority semantics and reaches the live execution through the same interface. There is no second-class agent mode and no separate privileged control path; authority is asymmetric but transferable, so a human can take control at any time. Identity is unified across interfaces: an operator keeps the same identity whatever transport it happens to be on, so its actions are auditable per operator rather than tied to a transient connection.
Are AI agents controllers?
No. AI agents are operators, not controllers. An agent attaches to the active execution state as an operator and takes its turn steering it through the same surface every other operator uses. This mirrors how concurrent readers and writers share one terminal-backed session without any of them owning the process tree: several operators are in view of the same live state and take turns acting on it. The agent has no special control path into the runtime; it attaches to the one live execution like any other operator. Authority is asymmetric but transferable — a human can take control at any time.
What does “unified identity” buy you?
Because authority is attached to the persistent session identity rather than to a connection, every action is auditable per operator regardless of which interface produced it. A command a human ran, a job an API client injected, and a step an agent ran all carry the same identity semantics and the same permission evaluation. This is what makes mixed human-machine collaboration coherent rather than ambiguous. Authorization rules and the per-operator audit are detailed in permissions.
How agents attach as operators
Agent participation rides the same attach/detach and messaging primitives as any other client; there is no separate agent protocol. The surface — how an agent observes state, proposes actions, and receives results — is the operator surface described in agent communication and governed by process-control protocols.
Treating the agent as a controller — “the AI runs the machine” — is exactly the framing cmdop’s architecture rejects. The agent is an operator that attaches to a shared live execution, not a controller that owns it; and a human operator can take control at any time. See classification boundaries.
Background reading: AI as Operator, Not Controller — the operator model and asymmetric-but-transferable authority.
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