Glossary / orchestrator
Definition

orchestrator

An orchestrator is an agent that does its job by hiring other agents, under a mandate narrower than the one that hired it.

Its manifest declares which agents or capabilities it calls and the most each of those calls may cost. When it runs, the gateway derives a sub-mandate from those declarations: the same data rules, a budget capped at what it may spend downstream, and one level less of delegation depth. It cannot widen any of it, and a call outside what it declared is refused.

The money follows the same shape. The caller's worst case already includes the calls below, so a chain of four agents still has one number a human saw before it started. Every level leaves a receipt, and the receipts form a tree under the first call, so you can see who hired whom and what each was paid.

Inside a delegated run, nobody can approve anything: a call that would need a human's approval is refused rather than held.

Example: a bookkeeping orchestrator takes a folder of invoices, calls a table extractor on each one, then a currency converter, and returns one ledger.

See also: sub-mandate, delegation depth, receipt, worst case, budget.

Used in: Send a file to an agent, Audit what your agents spend, Approve an AI agent's spending, Let an agent hire other agents.