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One free scan finds every outdated or missing driver and matches the right update for your exact hardware.Free scan · exact hardware matchIf an AI agent needs human approval before an action, silence must not authorize it. When nobody responds—or the review service cannot be reached—the protected action must remain blocked. Treating a timeout as approval turns an approval gate into a permission to act without approval.
What happens if an AI agent approval request times out?
The pending action must not execute. A system can handle the timeout by denying the request or by leaving the workflow paused until someone explicitly approves it later. Either way, timeout itself is never consent. No general timeout duration is established by the guidance cited here; set one to fit your workflow, but do not let its expiration grant permission.
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OpenAI’s guidance for agent workflows says to fail closed when review times out or becomes unavailable in the described authorized cybersecurity workflows. Its approval flow records an interruption rather than executing the tool, then allows the application to approve or reject pending items and resume saved run state. These are documented workflow behaviors, not guarantees that every agent framework provides them automatically. OpenAI: Guardrails and human review
Should an AI agent fail closed if no one approves?
Yes, for any action your policy says requires approval. The security invariant is simple: missing, expired, malformed, or unverifiable approval cannot authorize the side effect. “Fail closed” does not require every product to use the same status label. It means the protected operation cannot proceed when authorization is absent or cannot be confirmed.
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Keep that decision outside the agent’s own reasoning. The agent may propose a tool call and explain why it believes the action is safe, but its explanation—or a field such as user_confirmed—is not proof of authorization. Put a deterministic check at the execution boundary or in the downstream system that performs the side effect. OWASP recommends downstream authorization rather than trusting the model to decide. OWASP GenAI Security Project: LLM06:2025 Excessive Agency
How do I require human approval before an AI agent runs a tool?
Separate proposing an action from authorizing and executing it. A practical flow has three parts:
- Proposal: The agent submits a proposed tool call. It has not yet changed external state.
- Policy and review: A policy layer decides whether this action requires approval. If so, a reviewer approves or rejects that specific pending request.
- Enforcement: Immediately before execution, the tool boundary verifies the approval and permits the side effect only if the approval is valid for this call.
This last check must cover every side-effecting path. An agent-level guardrail may not cover every tool in a manager-style workflow, so place validation next to the tool that can change external state. For an action that requires review, a review-service outage should leave execution blocked rather than silently bypassing the check. OpenAI’s approval guidance
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What should an approval be bound to?
An approval is permission for a particular action, not a reusable “yes” for whatever the agent asks next. Bind it to enough information for the execution boundary to verify that the request being executed is the one the reviewer saw. OWASP’s guidance describes validation against the current actor and exact action, including the tool, target, and normalized parameters; it also calls for checking validity and consumption state. OWASP AI Agent Security Cheat Sheet
- Actor: Which user or authorized principal requested the operation.
- Tool and target: Which operation will run and what account, file, recipient, resource, or system it will affect.
- Parameters: The normalized inputs the reviewer approved, such as the amount, message, or resource identifier.
- Validity: Whether approval is still within its permitted period.
- Consumption: Whether the approval has already been used.
If the target or parameters change after review, the old approval no longer describes the action about to run. Require fresh approval. Check and consume an approval atomically just before execution so concurrent requests or retries cannot reuse the same authorization.
Should a timeout deny an action or leave it paused?
Both designs can preserve the same safety rule. Choose based on whether your workflow benefits from a terminal outcome or a recoverable pending state.
| Timeout outcome | Workflow behavior | Operational trade-off |
|---|---|---|
| Deny or expire the request | The pending action becomes terminal and cannot run under that request. | Clear resolution, but a later attempt requires a new request and approval. |
| Keep the workflow paused | The action remains pending; execution can resume only after explicit approval. | Allows recovery without starting over, but requires careful handling of stale requests, duplicate callbacks, and state after restart. |
OpenAI documents an approval interruption and resumption of saved run state. Microsoft’s Agent Governance Toolkit design record describes a durable pending protocol and fail-closed handling for timeout and other failures. These are implementation examples, not an industry-wide standard. Whichever design you choose, a late response must be checked against the request’s current state; it must not revive an expired or superseded action without an explicit, valid approval. Microsoft Agent Governance Toolkit: Action-Bound, Fail-Closed Approval Protocol
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Which agent actions should require approval?
Base review requirements on consequences, reversibility, external visibility, privilege, and the interruption cost of asking a reviewer. High-impact or irreversible actions are strong candidates for explicit review. Examples include sending a consequential message, deleting data, transferring value, publishing externally, or making privileged changes.
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Not every operation needs the same friction. OWASP gives read or search operations as examples that may skip human review while writes and higher-impact actions require it. That classification only decides whether review is needed; it does not itself authorize execution. The exact action must still pass the applicable authorization checks. Reduce unnecessary prompts by limiting the agent’s available tools and permissions to what its task requires, and define clear boundaries for actions it can perform without review. OWASP’s cheat sheet and LLM06:2025 Excessive Agency describe these risk-reduction measures.
How do I prevent an agent from reusing an old approval?
Treat approval as a short-lived, one-use authorization checked at the side-effect boundary—not as a durable flag in the agent’s conversation or workflow state. The boundary should verify that the approval matches the current action, is still valid, and has not already been consumed; it should mark the approval consumed as part of the same atomic operation that authorizes execution. A retry or concurrent request must not turn one approval into multiple executions.
Failure-path checklist
- No response or timeout: Confirm that the action is denied or remains paused and cannot run.
- Reviewer unavailable: Verify that the system blocks the side effect instead of bypassing review.
- Malformed or unauthenticated response: Reject it; do not infer approval from incomplete data.
- Restart or callback failure: Confirm that persisted state cannot turn a pending request into an authorized action accidentally.
- Changed parameters or target: Require review of the updated action.
- Replay or concurrency: Test duplicate delivery, retries, and simultaneous execution attempts against one approval.
- Audit reconstruction: Record the requested action, approval or denial, timeout or other failure, and execution outcome so an operator can determine what happened.
OWASP recommends testing these approval and failure conditions and retaining audit evidence. Microsoft’s design record illustrates durable state, idempotent duplicate handling, one-time consumption, and reconstructable events as implementation concerns; it is one project’s design, not a universal standard. OWASP AI Agent Security Cheat Sheet · Microsoft’s protocol design record
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