01
Access
What can the system read?
- Approved sources
- Relevant state
- Scoped context
Control / 004
What is it
allowed to do?
Two systems can use the same tools and reasoning yet be fundamentally different because their authority differs.
02
Authority
What can it change?
- Permitted actions
- Bounded writes
- Conditional decisions
03
Limits
Which boundaries constrain it?
- Value
- Confidence
- Time
- Frequency
- Risk class
04
Approval
Which actions require a human?
- Discretion
- Irreversible action
- Exception handling
05
Escalation
When must it stop?
- Policy conflict
- Unknown state
- Low confidence
- Limit exceeded
06
Verification
How are consequential actions checked?
- Logs
- Evaluation
- Outcome review
- Policy checks
Autonomy is not a maturity ladder
Choose autonomy in proportion to risk.
01
Assist
Human decides and acts.
02
Recommend
System proposes; human approves.
03
Bounded
System acts inside explicit limits.
04
Escalating
System stops at uncertainty or authority boundaries.
05
Autonomous
System operates without per-action approval inside defined scope.
The gate
A gate is where undoing costs more than checking.
Before it, the machine works freely. At it, something happens whose cost lands outside the system—a document issued, a message sent, money moved, a claim published. The gate is placed for the cost of reversal, not because the machine is untrusted; it stays exactly where it is as models improve. Where reversal is genuinely cheap, a gate is friction with no buyer, and the honest design has none.
If the EU AI Act applies to what you run, the gate is the part of the system its human-oversight requirement (Article 14) is asking about. We design it in from the start rather than adding a review step afterwards.
A human is one way to hold a gate. It is not the only one.
01
Human approval
A person reads the work and releases it.
A generated description is shown and edited before anything renders from it.
02
Explicit mode
The action runs only when a caller states intent outright.
A fulfilment run verifies by default and mutates only when marked live.
03
Held permission
The action runs only for a caller proven to hold the grant.
A fiscal receipt is issued only against that capability's exact grant.
04
Proven correctness
The action runs only when a machine check passes.
A lesson does not build when its declared arithmetic disagrees with the engine.