Permissions & Escalations

Keep humans in the loop for sensitive actions.

Some tools shouldn’t run without a human pressing approve — sending an email blast, charging a card, posting publicly. agntdata supports two complementary mechanisms:

always_ask tools

In the agent’s tool picker, mark sensitive tools as Always ask before using. The agent’s system prompt is automatically augmented with the rule:

Before calling any of [tool list], you MUST first call escalate_to_human describing the action and getting explicit approval. Do not call those tools without an approving response.

This pushes the gating into the agent’s reasoning loop instead of intercepting the call mid-flight, which keeps the conversation responsive and the audit trail clear.

escalate_to_human

A built-in utility tool every agent can call:

{
  "name": "escalate_to_human",
  "input": {
    "question": "OK to email the 142 prospects in this list with the draft below?",
    "context": { "subject": "...", "body": "..." }
  }
}

What happens:

1. A row is written to agent_escalations with status pending.
2. If your workspace has a Slack install with a default channel, a message is posted there with deep links back to the dashboard.
3. The question shows up in Inbox (/dashboard/inbox).
4. A human responds — the answer is returned as the tool result so the agent can continue.

Cancelled escalations return a structured error so the agent stops trying.

Audit trail

Every escalation, every approval, and every tool call is logged. Combined with the per-session transcript, this gives you a full record of what the agent did, what it asked, and how a human answered.