Glossary
Human-in-the-Loop
A required human review or approval at a defined control point.
Related guide: AI Agent Safety Terms in Market Tools. Updated 2026-09-17.
Human-in-the-Loop in context
Human review needs a defined decision point. In an approval workflow, distinguish a draft, a pending request, an approved action, and a completed action. A notification after completion is observation, not a gate that prevented the action.
Important boundary
A person merely watching a dashboard is not the same as enforced approval.
A human name on a dashboard is not evidence that a particular action was reviewed. Approval must relate to the actual action, not a different version or a broad instruction to keep working.
Worked example
Approval of one draft does not approve its replacement
Imagine an assistant preparing a public event announcement. The reviewer sees draft version 3, the destination account, and its intended publication time. They approve that specific request. The application holds the post until this approval is recorded.
Before publication, the assistant changes the date in the announcement and saves version 4. Reusing the version-3 approval would make the reviewer responsible for text they never saw. In this exercise, a changed draft returns to pending review; cancellation ends the request without publishing it.
To evaluate the workflow, try three paths: approve the unchanged draft, decline it, and change it after approval. The useful question is what actually blocks publication in each path. A dashboard that merely displays every completed post does not provide the same control, even if someone checks it every morning.
Continue in the guide
Designing an agent that can research but cannot silently trade
Read the complete applied scenarioKnowledge check
Check the distinction
An editor approves version 3. Version 4 changes the event date but keeps the same title. Should the old approval be reused in this exercise?
No. The approved content changed. The request returns to review so the editor can inspect version 4; an unchanged title does not make the two actions equivalent.
Source trail
Check the source or calculation
Background for approval gates and action integrity. The versioned announcement is our original fictional workflow.