Approvals and guardrails

The human gate

An approval stops a run until a person decides. What they are approving is frozen at the moment the request is raised, so the thing decided is the thing that happens.

How an approval is governed

• Recipients are set when the workflow is authored, and validated at publish.
• A policy cannot be quietly loosened: publishing rejects a change that weakens an existing gate.
• Maker-checker: the person who started the run cannot approve their own step.
• An approval that is not answered in time expires, and expiry fails the step rather than letting the work continue.
• An administrator can reassign a pending approval, one for one, and the reassignment is recorded.

Guardrails

Guardrails inspect what goes into a model, what it asks to do, and what comes back. They are checked at four points: before and after the model, and before and after a tool is used.

• Personal data and secrets can be blocked outright.
• Your organization can add its own blocked terms.
• A block pauses the run. Somebody with the right to do so either overrides it, with a reason, or rejects it.
• Both the block and the override are recorded.