/ax-audit

High-stakes agent action with no human escalation

Agent handles a refund, medical question, or legal inquiry with no way to hand off to a human: it gives a dangerous answer or refuses entirely. An escalation path is the trust floor.

What goes wrong

User asks about a billing dispute. Agent applies a partial credit that doesn't match. No "talk to a person" button. It keeps trying, makes things worse, user files a chargeback.

Detection

Surfaces: agent-tool-execution

Auditability: code-auditable

Static signals:

1. Find action handlers for high-stakes operations (financial, medical, legal, account deletion).
2. Check for escalation/handoff logic. Flag high-stakes handlers with no escalation path.

Concrete commands:

rg -l 'refund|payment|delete.*account|send.*email|legal|medical' --type=ts src/
rg 'escalat|handoff|transfer.*human|transfer.*agent' --type=ts src/

Judgment signals:

• An escalation tool never referenced in the system prompt is effectively invisible.
• Escalation is a handoff to a human. Refusal is declining a request the agent cannot safely complete. Improvising the nearest write to real state is not a success, and is not fixed by adding an escalate button.

False-positive guards:

• Skip // ax-audit-ignore:trust-no-escalation-path, test, and Storybook files.

Fix

Add escalate_to_human(reason, context) as an agent tool. Surface it in the UI as "Talk to a person."

Examples

Anti-pattern (fails):

const agentTools = {
  processRefund: async (amount: number) => {
    await api.refund(amount);
    return { success: true, message: "Refund processed." };
  },
};

Applied (passes):

const agentTools = {
  processRefund: async (amount: number) => {
    if (amount > ESCALATION_THRESHOLD) return { escalate: true, reason: "Exceeds limit" };
    await api.refund(amount);
    return { success: true };
  },
  escalateToHuman: async (reason: string, ctx: AgentContext) => {
    await support.transfer({ reason, transcript: ctx.messages });
    return { message: "Connecting you with a team member." };
  },
};

Default tier and overrides

Defaults to: release-blocker

Suppression

{/* ax-audit-ignore:trust-no-escalation-path, internal admin tool, operator is the human */}
<AgentToolPanel tools={adminTools} />