SQCAD: Lifecycle-Aware Authorization for Scope-Qualified Persistent Memory in Long-Term Agents

Agent-memory systems typically rank records by their usefulness to the current query, but persistent authorization asks a different question: whether a record may keep influencing decisions that have not arrived. Relevance is calibrated on recorded use, whereas authorization is a claim about decisions that history has not yet settled; refining the first does not by itself answer the second. To address this problem we formalize persistent authorization as a sequential decision problem, first proving that any binary rule reading a score incurs unavoidable worst-case regret when it conflates states whose optimal keep/archive decisions differ, and deriving an exact fixed-continuation decomposition separating representation loss from execution error. Guided by both results, we propose SQCAD, a lifecycle controller whose qualification, authorization, competitive access, and bounded recovery share one scope- and lineage-qualified evidence state. Separating persistent permission from temporary access lets an archived record answer a query without being reauthorized. LifecycleBench makes these decisions measurable by scoring both branches of every keep/archive action under a common continuation. Experiments on the public tasks place the structured-prior guard first: it attains the highest frozen LoCoMo F1 of the evaluated methods at 97.6% less authorized decision memory than the ActMem adapter, and of the LongMemEval-S comparisons that survive Holm correction, 32 of 34 favour SQCAD. Lineage, one retained field, lowers the representation floor by an order of magnitude where it targets it and leaves it unchanged elsewhere. The criterion binds any system that commits a persistent decision on a scalar score, whether the decision governs retention, eviction, or admission. Qualification and lineage raise downstream accuracy alike, so the metrics the field reports cannot tell them apart, highlighting that persistent authorization is a property of the memory decision rather than a by-product of retrieval quality.