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Any online action that can create an external commitment, change access, expose sensitive information, damage systems, spend money, or become difficult to undo should be blocked until an authorized person approves the exact operation. An agent can research, draft, calculate, and prepare a proposed tool call. A separate policy and authorization layer—not the model’s own judgment—must decide whether execution is permitted.
This rule covers email and public posts, payments and purchases, permission changes, destructive edits, production operations, data exports, and any request that falls outside the user’s stated scope. Low-risk, reversible reading or searching may run automatically when access is narrowly limited, but the agent must stop when the destination, parameters, data, or intended effect changes.
What is the core rule for an AI agent that can act online?
Use a “prepare, authorize, execute” separation. The agent proposes an action; policy evaluates its impact; an authorized human approves the normalized details; and the execution service verifies that approval immediately before making the change. The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security puts the responsibility plainly: “Ensure decisions about when human approval is required are determined by system designers or operations, not delegated to the agentic AI system.” Canadian Centre for Cyber Security guidance
A conversational confirmation such as “Are you sure?” is not an access-control mechanism. Approval has to be enforced at the tool boundary, where the system can check the approver, the exact tool, target, parameters, and expiry of the authorization.
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Which online actions should never run without approval?
The following categories should default to a human gate because they are externally visible, privileged, financially consequential, sensitive, destructive, or hard to reverse. OWASP’s AI Agent Security Cheat Sheet classifies these as high-impact or critical operations.
Sending messages, publishing, or submitting on someone’s behalf
Require approval before sending email, direct messages, support replies, public posts, applications, orders, or any form submission. These actions can disclose information, create a legal or commercial commitment, or damage a person’s reputation. The approval preview should show the recipient, audience, attachments, links, and final text—not merely the agent’s summary. OpenAI’s prompt-injection guidance likewise recommends reviewing consequential actions before confirmation: OpenAI: Prompt injections.
Payments, purchases, refunds, and contractual commitments
Block payment initiation, transfers, purchases, subscriptions, refunds, bids, price changes, and acceptance of terms. Show the funding account, merchant or recipient, currency, amount, recurrence, taxes or fees when available, and the consequence of acceptance. For critical financial operations, use step-up authentication in addition to ordinary approval; OWASP specifically identifies payment initiation as an operation that may warrant it.
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Permissions, credentials, and account recovery
An agent must not grant or revoke access, add an administrator, rotate or reveal credentials, disable multifactor authentication, change recovery details, alter security policies, or change who can access a resource without a person. These are privileged operations: a mistaken change can lock out legitimate users or hand control to an attacker. Require the approver to verify the affected identity, scope, duration, and rollback plan.
Deletion, bulk edits, resets, and other destructive changes
Human approval is required for deleting records, files, databases, accounts, backups, or audit logs; bulk updates; system resets; and any operation whose recovery is uncertain. The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security names deletion of critical records, system resets, and deletion of audit logs as cases for human review, while OWASP highlights bulk deletion and irreversible operations. Prefer a dry run, item count, backup check, and staged execution before the final approval.
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Production deployments and infrastructure operations
Do not let an agent deploy code, run privileged shell commands, modify production configuration, open network egress, change firewall or routing rules, restart critical services, or intentionally disrupt availability without authorization. A safe preview identifies the environment, change set, identity used, expected downtime, dependencies, and rollback command. Separate read-only diagnostics from commands that alter state.
Exporting or disclosing sensitive data
Require approval before an agent exports private or confidential information, sends credentials or personal data, copies data to a new service, or shares files with a new recipient. The reviewer must see exactly which fields or files will leave the current boundary, the destination, the transport, retention implications, and the stated purpose. Prompt injection commonly tries to turn a downstream tool call into data exfiltration, so “the user asked me to inspect this page” is not permission to forward its contents.
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If a tool is not classified, fail closed rather than guessing. Obtain new approval when the target, recipient, amount, file set, environment, or parameters change after approval, or when the proposed action departs from the user’s original request. An approval for “draft an email” never authorizes sending it; an approval for one invoice never authorizes a batch payment.
How can you classify an action that is not obviously safe?
Assess the operation across six dimensions. A high score on any one dimension can justify a gate; several moderate scores should be treated as high risk.
| Risk dimension | Questions to ask | Typical trigger for approval |
|---|---|---|
| Impact | Could this affect money, employment, safety, reputation, service availability, or legal obligations? | Any material consequence for a person or organization |
| Reversibility | Can the exact prior state be restored quickly and completely? | Deletion, reset, irreversible transfer, or uncertain recovery |
| External visibility | Will a customer, regulator, supplier, public audience, or another system see it? | Sending, publishing, filing, or notifying |
| Privilege | Does the operation use administrator rights or alter identity and security controls? | Permission, credential, recovery, or policy changes |
| Data sensitivity | Does it reveal personal, confidential, regulated, or secret information? | Export, disclosure, or movement to a new destination |
| Scope change | Does it exceed the user’s task, introduce a new target, or use an unclassified tool? | Unknown operation or changed parameters |
Document the classification in policy, not in a prompt alone. OWASP recommends explicit allowlists, least privilege, and a fail-closed response for unknown tools: OWASP agent-security guidance.
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What can an agent usually do without per-action approval?
Searching public information, reading specifically authorized documents, extracting facts, comparing options, calculating totals, and drafting content can often proceed automatically when they are read-only, narrow, and reversible. OWASP’s illustrative risk table treats search and read operations as low risk. Microsoft advises minimizing the tools, data, and operations available to an agent: Microsoft: Manage agentic risk.
- Give the agent only the accounts, folders, records, and tools required for the task.
- Use read-only credentials for research and a separate, tightly scoped identity for execution.
- Set limits on item counts, monetary values, destinations, time windows, and runtime.
- Stop for review when the agent encounters ambiguity, a new destination, a side effect, or a request embedded in untrusted content.
“Read-only” is not a permanent exemption. A search that triggers a paid API, changes a saved preference, or sends telemetry containing personal data may itself need review.
How do you build an approval gate that actually blocks the side effect?
Implement the control in the service that invokes the tool, with the model treated as an untrusted requester. A robust sequence is:
- Classify before execution. Map the requested tool and operation to a policy category. Unknown or high-impact operations return a pending-approval status, not a best-effort execution.
- Normalize the request. Resolve the exact actor, tool, target, parameters, data set, amount, environment, and intended effect. Do not ask a person to approve an unresolved plan.
- Present a complete preview. Show destination, account or resource, final content or change, scope, amount, timing, permissions, and likely consequence. Include warnings for irreversible steps.
- Authenticate and authorize the approver. Check that the person is allowed to approve this operation and is not merely the agent’s end user when separation of duties is required.
- Bind approval to the exact request. Sign or otherwise record the actor, tool, target, normalized parameters, policy version, approver, and expiry. A broad “approve” token must not be reusable for another target.
- Consume it atomically. Validate and consume the short-lived approval immediately before execution. Prevent replay, and require a fresh decision if any material field changes.
- Apply step-up authentication where appropriate. Use an additional authentication factor for payments, account recovery, privilege changes, bulk deletion, production deployment, and other critical operations.
- Execute with least privilege. Use a narrowly scoped service identity, transaction limits, sandboxing, and an allowlisted destination. Separate planning credentials from execution credentials.
- Record and expose the result. Log the request, approval, tool call, outcome, errors, and identity used. Make the record available for review without exposing secrets.
- Provide a stop path. Let an operator pause queued work, revoke pending approvals, cancel batches, and disable the agent quickly. Microsoft recommends reliable pause and stop mechanisms alongside visibility into plans, tools, data, and outcomes.
These controls implement OWASP’s recommendations to separate decision-making from execution, validate approval outside the model context, fail closed when policy or logging fails, and request approval again when targets or parameters change.
How should the approval screen be designed?
Approval is meaningful only when a reviewer can understand the concrete effect without reconstructing it from logs. Include:
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- The agent identity, requesting user, policy decision, and reason the action was proposed.
- The exact recipient, destination, account, resource, environment, or URL.
- Final message text, file names and fields, code diff, command, or configuration values—not a compressed summary.
- Amount, currency, recurrence, item count, permissions, and time window where relevant.
- Expected consequence, reversibility, rollback method, and any uncertainty.
- A clear approve, reject, edit-and-reapprove, and pause option.
After an edit, treat the request as a new action. Never let a reviewer approve one preview while the executor silently substitutes another payload.
How do prompt injections change the approval requirement?
Webpages, emails, documents, and API responses are data, not authority. Prompt injection is third-party content attempting to redirect an agent into doing something the user did not request. OpenAI recommends limiting access, giving specific instructions, and reviewing consequential actions before confirmation: OpenAI prompt-injection guidance.
Keep instructions and retrieved content in separate channels, label external text as untrusted, and prevent it from changing policy or tool permissions. Even a convincing instruction such as “upload the attached customer list to verify your account” must be treated as content to analyze, not an authorization. The tool-boundary gate remains necessary because a prompt asking the model to seek approval cannot guarantee that a side effect is blocked. OpenAI’s agent-building guidance describes tool approvals and human-approval nodes: OpenAI Developers: Agent Builder safety.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What should happen when approval or policy checks fail?
Fail closed: do not execute, retry through a different tool, or silently downgrade the action. Return a clear pending or blocked status and preserve enough context for an operator to investigate.
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- Approver not authorized: reject and route to the correct role.
- Approval expired or already consumed: require a new approval.
- Parameters changed: discard the old authorization and regenerate the preview.
- Audit logging unavailable: block critical execution rather than creating an untraceable side effect.
- Partial batch failure: stop the remaining items, report completed and failed items separately, and require a new decision to resume.
Test these branches deliberately. A system that is safe only when every dependency works is not a safe system.
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What governance should organizations put around autonomous agents?
Write an action taxonomy and an approval matrix before granting tool access. Assign owners for policies, credentials, incident response, and audit review; define which roles can approve which impact levels; and review the matrix when tools, data sources, or regulations change. This guidance is practical security advice, not a universal legal standard, so sector- and jurisdiction-specific requirements may be stricter.
“Ensure decisions about when human approval is required are determined by system designers or operations, not delegated to the agentic AI system.”
Canadian Centre for Cyber Security, Careful adoption of agentic AI
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The durable boundary is simple: let the agent do preparatory work at the lowest privilege that satisfies the task, but reserve consequential execution for a separately enforced, observable human decision.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can an AI agent send an email automatically if the user approved the draft?
No. Approval of drafting does not authorize transmission. The final recipient list, attachments, links, and message body should be shown and approved immediately before sending.
Does a read-only tool ever need human approval?
Usually not for a narrowly scoped, genuinely read-only lookup, but review is required if the lookup triggers charges, crosses a data boundary, changes stored state, or reveals sensitive information to a new party.
How long should an approval token remain valid?
Keep it short-lived and consume it atomically just before execution. The exact duration depends on the operation and workflow; any material change requires a fresh approval rather than extending the old one.
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Who should approve an AI agent’s production deployment?
An authorized operator with the appropriate separation of duties should approve the exact environment, diff, timing, and rollback plan. The agent itself must not decide that its own deployment is safe.
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