Circuit breakers for agents: block retries until a human clears flagged behavior
sjgadler · x · 2026-11-10
In a discussion on agent monitoring, sjgadler argues that semi-synchronous monitors aren't enough — the real goal is a "circuit breaker": once enough flagged actions accumulate, the agent should be blocked from retrying until a human proactively clears the behavior.
On the Control Room proposal: it has strong ideas, like stateful monitoring that can broadly halt inference for a job even when new trajectories look innocuous. The concern is that AI might circumvent Control Room so those safeguards never take effect.
The attached images add context:
- Guidelight AI Standards' Control v1.1 clause 4e "Circuit breaking": after enough flagged actions accumulate, no gated or closely-trailed actions can be taken until a human deems it safe
- A Control Room integration example: RL jobs run with a monitor model; on detection it can stop the job via Control Room, after which any inference request from that jobid to any model on any engine is denied
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