When the active provider returns a 401/403 that survives its per-provider
credential-refresh attempt (revoked OAuth, blocked/expired key, or an
account pinned to a dead/staging inference endpoint), the conversation
loop now escalates to the configured fallback chain instead of dead-ending.
Before: the generic failover dispatch fired only for {rate_limit, billing};
auth/auth_permanent fell through to 'switch providers manually' advice and
never called _try_activate_fallback(). A user whose primary credential was
broken kept thrashing on the same dead credential every turn — the main
agent appeared 'stuck in fallback mode' while never actually failing over.
This also affected auxiliary tasks (compression, vision, title-gen), since
auto-resolved aux follows the main provider.
After: a persistent auth failure with a configured fallback chain switches
to the next provider (mirroring the rate-limit/billing failover path),
guarded one-shot per attempt by TurnRetryState.auth_failover_attempted.
When no fallback is configured the behavior is unchanged — it falls through
to the existing terminal handling and provider-specific troubleshooting
guidance.
Tests: test_auth_provider_failover.py — 401/403 classify as auth, the
gating condition fires only with a chain present + guard unset, the guard
blocks repeats, and non-auth (500) errors do not trigger auth failover.