Binding vs freshness

Binding says which exact values a decision committed to. Freshness asks whether the state that matters still holds when the approval is used.

In APS, action_ref binds the action: actor, operation, target, exact payload, authority scopes, issue time, nonce. decision_ref binds the decision to the action, the evaluated authority state, the policy input, the decision context, and the decision output.

Binding does not make the underlying claims true or keep them true. Section 5.4:

"Matching decision_ref values establish that the same component digests were named. They do not establish that the policy was correct, the inputs were complete, or the underlying claims were true."

The world can change after approval while every digest still verifies.

At consumption, the boundary MUST re-validate what can have changed since issuance, explicitly including revocation status and temporal validity; an already consumed, expired, or stale approval MUST NOT admit dispatch. Spend follows a different mechanism: reserved at approval, settled at completion. When verification policy depends on referenced evidence, the verifier resolves it and checks the exact bytes; failed resolution classifies as invalid, indeterminate, or unsupported, and must not be collapsed into valid.

A matching binding proves continuity of the commitments, not freshness of the world they describe.

The distinction is old. This page fixes the APS vocabulary for it and the line drawn by draft-pidlisnyi-aps.

Spec: draft-pidlisnyi-aps-03 (published 2026-07-18), sections 3.5, 4.1, 4.3, 5.3.2, 5.4, 5.5, 5.6
Canonical: https://agent-passport.org/terms/binding-vs-freshness
First published: 2026-08-07