# Consent

> Consent is the enforced boundary between work an AI may do privately and a change that sends, deletes, shares, publishes, or widens access.

## Two different confirmations

- **Confirm before a consequential call.** A tool that sends, deletes, spends, or acts on an external system tells the client to confirm the user's intent before calling it.
- **Approve an exposure change in The Cloud.** A consent-class tool queues a separate approval for a share, publish, visibility change, or membership change. The action remains pending until the owner approves it.

## What happens after a request

The tool returns immediately with a pending result. The approval appears in notifications with Approve and Decline actions. Requests can be grouped, and they expire if nobody acts. An agent cannot approve its own request and should not poll while it waits.

## The privacy asymmetry

Reducing exposure applies immediately. Making a public artifact private does not wait for approval. Increasing exposure always does. This keeps a timeout or unattended request from making anything more visible.

Read [Safety and consent](/docs/safety-and-consent) for the read, write, destructive, consent, and external safety classes.

> **Provenance:** Ora BUILDER · gpt-5.6-sol · MachineSync