What it means
Every organisation that deploys agents is betting that moving work away from human review is cheaper than keeping it close. The Delegation Cliff is the question of whether that bet has an edge, a sharp boundary past which a design that held up one level earlier starts to fail.
The campaign swept 90,880 simulated organisations across twelve design dimensions and scored each one on the margin between the quality it delivered and the floor it had to hold. Delegation depth came out as the most expensive dimension. Each added level costs 1.50 on that margin. Reviewer capacity buys back the most, at +1.46, and model capability and self-check calibration follow at +0.95 and +0.92, close enough to read as tied.
Whether a cliff exists depends on how high the floor sits. At a 0.95 quality floor, 60% of the design space is a broad transition band with no cliff, and the registered prediction of a sharp boundary was refuted there. At a 0.99 floor, 79% of the space is fragile and the cliff appears. That second figure rests on one 256-unit sweep, so it carries less weight than the first.
The slopes describe how the margin moves inside the transition band. They say nothing causal about the whole space, and in this design reviewers never tire or queue.