How approvals work
1
Agent requests an approval-bound action
The agent calls
invoke.call() with a tool classified as approval-bound. Invoke immediately stages the action and returns pending_approval.2
Invoke notifies the reviewer
The staged action appears in your Invoke dashboard. The reviewer sees the tool, parameters, and the agent that requested it.
3
Reviewer approves or rejects
The reviewer makes a decision in the dashboard or via the API.
- Approved → Invoke proceeds to state revalidation
- Rejected → Invoke returns
blockedto the agent
4
State revalidated before execution
Before the approved action runs, Invoke revalidates the current state against the conditions that existed when approval was granted.If state has drifted — the customer was already refunded, the deployment status changed — Invoke returns
replan_required instead of executing. The stale approval never fires.Why state revalidation matters
Approvals can have long delays between grant and execution. In that window:- The customer may have already received a refund through another channel
- The deployment may have rolled back
- The target record may have changed
Approval outcomes
Next steps
- Tool Safety Classes — how to classify tools as approval-bound
- Traces — inspect the full approval timeline in execution traces
- Execution Records — the durable record created for every staged action