The category map · one page

Three boxes, not two.

Most evaluations start with identity and guardrails and assume the action is covered. The third box — Execution Authority — answers the question neither of the others asks: may this exact action execute, now, under whose approval, with proof afterwards. It reads the first two as inputs. This page is the map, the one-sentence answer, and the artifact that makes the claim checkable — on one sheet, so it can be sent.

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The map

Identity proves who. Guardrails judge content. Authority decides the action.

Identity and guardrails are inputs to authority, not rivals to it. Decionis sits above your identity layer and beside your guardrails — not instead of either.

Necessary. Not sufficient.

Identity and access

Who is acting, and what may it reach?

What it answers: Authenticates the person or the agent, issues and rotates its credentials, and decides what it may reach in general — roles, scopes, tokens, and the delegation chain from a human to the agent acting for them.
What it cannot answer: Whether the action in front of it should happen. A correctly logged-in agent with the right role can still stack discounts below cost, and a valid token can still spend past the budget it was granted under.
What it hands to Decionis: The principal, its delegation and its scopes — the inputs the authority check reads, from the identity layer you already run. Nothing here is replaced.

Examples: Okta · Microsoft Entra · Auth0 · WorkOS

Decionis vs identity and access management

Necessary. Not sufficient.

Guardrails and AI security

Is this input or output unsafe, hostile, or out of policy?

What it answers: Filters prompts and responses, detects injection, leakage and anomalous behaviour, and scores the risk of what a model is about to say or has just said — inside the AI layer, in real time.
What it cannot answer: Whether the resulting action may execute, or who approved it. An agent can reach the same tool from outside the guardrail, and a perfectly clean output can still be a purchase nobody authorised.
What it hands to Decionis: Risk and intent signals, as evidence inside the evaluation. A guardrail verdict is a fact the policy reads; it is not the decision, and it leaves no record a counterparty can check.

Examples: Guardrails AI · Check Point (Lakera) · F5 AI Guardrails · Amazon Bedrock Guardrails · NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails

Decionis vs model guardrails

The third box

Execution Authority

May this exact action execute, now, under whose approval — and can that be proven afterwards?

What it answers: Evaluates the proposed action against the organisation's own policy before it commits, holds it for a named person when the rules require one, and signs a record of what was permitted that someone who does not run Decionis can re-derive.
What it cannot answer: Who the actor is, or whether a prompt was hostile — it consumes both from the boxes beside it. It is the organisation's instrument for the organisation's policy, not an arbiter between the organisation and its counterparties.
What it hands on: A signed Decision Dossier and an execution grant bound to the exact action — what the downstream system executes, and what an auditor, a bank or a buyer verifies against a published key.

Decionis

The category, in full

Identity and guardrails are inputs to authority, not rivals to it. Decionis sits above your identity layer and beside your guardrails — not instead of either.

Decision intelligence determines what an AI wants to do. Execution authority determines whether it is permitted to happen. As AI gets faster and more autonomous, identity becomes a weaker proxy for authority.

The map folds the seven-layer control stack into three questions. One layer belongs to no box: execution itself — the downstream system’s commit — is what all three exist to govern.

The answer, in one sentence

Decionis decides what has authority to happen.

Nothing reaches execution without passing through the decision. The three boxes are the three questions on the way there; only the third is answered at the moment of execution, and only the third leaves a record of the answer.

Evaluated outside the system it governs

Independent, in two specific senses.

Every adjacent tool is embedded in the stack it evaluates — a gateway watching its own traffic, an identity provider auditing its own tokens. The authority has to stand outside that, and the word has exactly two honest meanings.

The architectural claim

Independent of the system it governs

The policy is evaluated outside the application that proposed the action, so the check survives the failure of the thing it checks. A floor enforced inside the tool that moved the price is gone the moment that tool is what went wrong.

The evidential claim

Independently verifiable

The verdict can be re-derived from the dossier by someone who does not run Decionis. A signature proves a record was not altered afterwards; re-derivation proves the answer was the one the policy required.

The second claim is checkable without an account: a public corpus of signed dossiers and an open verifier let anyone confirm that the verifier refuses what it should, and a published key set lets anyone verify a real record. Check a Decision Dossier yourself.

Independent describes where the check runs and who can recompute it. It says nothing about the commercial relationship: Decionis is a paid vendor, enforces its customer’s own policy, and issues no opinion of its own.

Checkable, not asserted

A public corpus, an open verifier, and a DOI.

Synthetic Decision Dossiers — portable artifact, inputs snapshot, JSON-LD and execution binding — signed by a deliberately published Ed25519 key, with the negative cases a verifier must refuse, so the verifier's behaviour can be reproduced by anyone without an account. Version v0.1.4, published 10 September 2026, Apache-2.0. DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22692903.

npx -y @decionis/verify \
  --file dossiers/vectors/owned-execution-bound.json \
  --jwks dossiers/corpus-jwks.json

@decionis/verify@0.4.0 on npm. The corpus proves the verifier behaves correctly, including when it must refuse; a production dossier verifies against the live key set, documented separately.

Identity and access · Guardrails and AI security · Execution Authority — the same map renders on the category page and above every named comparison. Decionis, Inc. · decionis.com/category-map