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AdCP governance is intentionally asymmetric. A buyer agent spends money on behalf of a principal, so it needs authority from that principal. A seller does not need authority from the buyer to decide whether it will accept a campaign, creative, or change. The seller instead acts under its own commercial, operational, and legal policies. This is a split-authority model, not a missing seller-side approval layer.

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Keep the authority layers separate

A successful governance check establishes buyer authority; it does not oblige a seller to transact. Conversely, a seller’s willingness to transact does not grant a caller permission to spend buyer funds.

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Seller review is internal

A seller may use deterministic rules, an AI system, human review, or any combination of them to decide whether to accept a request. That workflow does not need protocol orchestration and does not make the seller a counterpart governance authority over the buyer’s plan. Buyer-visible timing may still be useful. Proposal-bound change terms can state that an action is seller_managed and provide elapsed-time response and completion maxima. Those terms describe the service the buyer can rely on; they do not reveal whether a person reviewed the request or require the buyer to coordinate the seller’s internal queue.

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Rejection is a disposition, not a governance veto

An authorized action can still fail under seller policy. Use the error category that identifies the actual boundary:
  • POLICY_VIOLATION when seller content, advertising, legal, or commercial policy rejects an otherwise authorized action.
  • ACTION_NOT_ALLOWED when a media-buy change is outside the accepted terms or is not currently available.
  • PERMISSION_DENIED when the authenticated caller, credential, account scope, or signed governance context lacks authority.
When a seller rejects an approved action, the buyer reports the failure through report_plan_outcome with outcome: "failed". The governance audit retains the bounded, buyer-attributed error evidence so an auditor can explain why execution did not occur. The copied error is an audit record; it neither grants the seller plan authority nor becomes seller-attested evidence.

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Governance-agent acceptance is dependency management

A seller may declare which governance agents it can depend on and reject an unacceptable binding during sync_governance. This decision is about the endpoint the seller must call for authorization and recovery. It does not allow the seller to modify the buyer’s governance rules or approve buyer spend. Together, these boundaries preserve the central invariant: buyer authority, seller acceptance, negotiated commercial rights, and seller-internal operations remain attributable without being collapsed into one jointly controlled governance agent.