Human Gating

Human gating is the rule that separates Arkeus from most agent systems. Agents in Arkeus do not send emails, post to social platforms, commit to calendar events with external parties, or act on the outside world on their own. They propose. Ryan approves. Only then does the action leave the building.

The gate is not a flat bottleneck. Five rules fire the approval requirement. Public scope triggers it: anything marked scope: public in the action request needs explicit sign-off. External send triggers it: any verb that touches email, messaging, booking, or publishing endpoints. Asserted-class transitions trigger it: moving a fact into or out of the asserted category is load-bearing enough that the executor pauses.

Multi-downstream corrections trigger it: if a single proposed change would cascade through two or more dependent beliefs, the executor walks the belief ledger and surfaces the blast radius before acting. Governance-file diffs trigger it: any proposed edit to the kernel files (north_star, identity, cognition_os, corrections, decisions) requires Ryan to merge.

If none of the five rules fire, the executor auto-runs. The gate is designed to be invisible for safe, reversible, low-blast-radius operations — restarting a local service, editing a memory file, labeling an email. It becomes visible only when the blast radius earns the interruption.

The underlying principle: autonomy creeps open through earned trust, not declarations. When a specific verb, agent, and target have accumulated enough clean approvals, the routing allowlist flips that cell from manual to auto. The allowlist is the log of what the system has actually earned, which is slower but truer than saying the system is autonomous and hoping for the best.