“Human in the loop” is meaningless unless we define what was approved

Reddit r/AI_Agents News

Summary

Discusses how human approval in AI agent workflows can be meaningless if the approved action differs from the executed one, urging stricter binding between approval and final action.

People often say risky agent actions are safe because a human approves them. But what did the person approve? A message saying “issue a $200 refund”? The exact account and amount? The actual request that was eventually sent to the tool? Suppose the workflow pauses after approval, reloads some customer data and rebuilds the request before executing it. The final action may be slightly different from the one the person saw. The approval still exists in the logs, but it no longer proves very much. How tightly are people binding human approval to the action that eventually happens?
Original Article

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