Glossary
Canonical definitions of the terms used across Saifuro documentation.
These terms carry the same meaning everywhere in Saifuro documentation. Where a word is used loosely elsewhere in the industry, the definition here is the one that applies to our product.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Agent | Software acting on behalf of a principal and able to initiate spending |
| Principal | The person or role granting an agent authority to spend |
| Mandate | An agent's formalized spending authority: limits, categories, expiry, revocation |
| Policy | The set of rules every spend request is evaluated against |
| Policy class | A group of rules sharing an enablement mode and a failure mode |
| Decision | The outcome of evaluating a request: verdict, reason, and policy version, signed and bound to the request it answers |
| Decision code | The machine readable verdict, such as allow, review, or a denial |
| Decision log | The append only record of every decision, available to the customer |
| Observe mode | Running on production traffic without blocking, recording what would have happened |
| Enforcement mode | Running with real blocking, enabled per policy class |
| Metering | Counting calls per request, per session, or per outcome |
| Payment provider | The licensed organization that executes the customer's settlement |
| Tokenization | Replacing card credentials with a token at the system edge |
| Custody | Holding someone else's funds; Saifuro is non custodial by design |
| Agentic commerce | Commerce in which autonomous agents act as buyers or sellers |
Two distinctions worth keeping straight. A policy is the rulebook; a mandate is one agent's slice of it. And a decision is the verdict itself, while the record is where that verdict is written down.
A note on the word mandate
Mandate is also a core term in AP2, where it names a cryptographically signed proof that a purchase was authorized: an artifact covering one transaction.
A Saifuro mandate is standing authority. It covers a class of future spending with limits, categories, and an expiry, and it is evaluated on every request instead of being produced for one.
Both senses appear in the agentic payments literature. Everywhere in this documentation the word carries the Saifuro sense above.