process · irreversible-action-gate

Gate irreversible actions outside the model

Require an out-of-band approval for deletes, payments, sends, and other irreversible tool calls.

Classify tools by reversibility and have the harness, not the model, block irreversible calls until a human or a policy check approves. The model can request but cannot execute. This makes skipping a safety step impossible rather than merely discouraged.

Requires: Adds latency to every gated call, and requires classifying tools by reversibility up front.

Addresses: Prioritizing safety under conflicting goals

Contexts: Autonomous agent, Coding agent, Customer support

Does it work?

supported so far1 supporting · 0 contesting source · last moved 2026-09-04

Efficacy claims — what this technique actually moves, under which conditions, and whether that has been contested.

mechanismsingle paper
Gating irreversible actions works only if the harness mediates every side effect, not only the branch awaiting approval. Where a gate suspends its own branch while a sibling's effect still executes, the control reads as a barrier and is not one — and the shipped implementations in widely used agent frameworks have this gap rather than it being a misconfiguration.

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Does it work?

Code

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