Irreversible Action Gates

Some actions cannot be taken back. A payment is settled, a contract is signed, a record is deleted, and no apology or follow-up message reverses them. When an agent can trigger these outcomes, the last line of defense cannot be a probabilistic model decision.

Agent instructions and topic classifications guide behavior, but they are not guarantees. A misclassified utterance, an injected prompt, or a hallucinated variable can push an agent past a boundary it was only told to respect. Irreversible decisions need enforcement that does not depend on model judgment.

Separate the reversible from the irreversible

• Classify every action the agent can invoke by blast radius: fully reversible, costly to reverse, or irreversible.
• Treat money movement, contract changes, external communications, and deletions as irreversible by default.
• Enforce irreversible paths in deterministic automation such as Flow, Apex, or validation rules, not in prompt text.
• Route high-impact decisions through a deliberate human gate when automation alone cannot carry the accountability.

Build gates into the execution path

1. Put the enforcement logic inside the Flow or Apex the action calls, so the gate holds no matter which topic or instruction triggered it.
2. Use variables and action filters to block execution when inputs fall outside approved thresholds, and return a clear refusal to the agent.
3. Require explicit confirmation or human approval for irreversible actions, and log who approved, what was approved, and when.
4. Test the gates adversarially: attempt deletions, refunds, and sends with out-of-policy inputs and confirm the automation refuses them.