Trust But Verify: Our Approach to AI Agent Autonomy

Authensor Team · 2026-02-13

Trust But Verify: Our Approach to AI Agent Autonomy

There are two extreme positions on AI agent autonomy. One says agents should operate freely — any constraint reduces their usefulness. The other says agents should require human approval for everything — autonomy is too dangerous.

Both positions are wrong. The first leads to incidents. The second leads to abandonment, because an agent that can't act without approval for every keystroke isn't an agent — it's an autocomplete with a confirmation dialog.

SafeClaw's philosophy sits between these extremes: trust but verify.

What Trust Means

Trust in the SafeClaw context means allowing agents to execute actions without human approval — within defined boundaries. When you configure a policy that allows file reads within your workspace, you're expressing trust: "I trust this agent to read files in this directory without asking me first."

Trust is not binary. SafeClaw supports graduated trust levels:

Full trust — The action is allowed without logging. Reserved for truly harmless operations like reading public documentation.
Trust with logging — The action is allowed but recorded in the session log. This is the default for most allowed actions.
Trust with monitoring — The action is allowed and logged, and it contributes to the session's risk score. If enough monitored actions accumulate, the trust level automatically decreases.
No trust — The action requires explicit human approval before execution.

Most policy configurations use a mix of these levels. Common operations get trust with logging. Sensitive operations get trust with monitoring. Dangerous operations get no trust.

What Verify Means

Verification in SafeClaw happens at three levels:

Pre-execution verification — The action classifier checks every action against your policy before it runs. This is the primary verification layer, and it's synchronous — the action doesn't execute until the classifier approves it. Post-execution verification — After an action completes, SafeClaw verifies that the actual outcome matches the expected outcome. A file write that was approved for /workspace/src/index.js is verified to have actually written to that path, not somewhere else via a symlink or race condition. Session-level verification — The risk signal detection system continuously verifies that the agent's overall behavior pattern is consistent with its declared purpose. A coding agent that starts making unusual network requests triggers session-level verification flags.

The Trust Escalator

One of the most powerful concepts in SafeClaw is the trust escalator — trust that changes dynamically based on the agent's behavior.

A new agent starts with the trust level defined in your policy. As it operates without triggering risk signals, its effective trust can increase — rate limits relax, monitoring becomes less intensive. But if it triggers risk signals, trust decreases — rate limits tighten, more actions require approval, and the dashboard highlights the session for human attention.

This creates a natural feedback loop. Well-behaved agents earn more autonomy over time. Poorly-behaved agents lose it. The human only needs to intervene when the system can't make a confident decision.

Why This Works

Trust but verify works because it aligns incentives. The developer wants their agent to be productive. The safety system wants the agent to be safe. By granting trust within boundaries and verifying continuously, both goals are achieved simultaneously.

It also matches how human teams work. A senior developer gets trusted with production access but their changes are still code-reviewed. A junior developer has more restricted access but less review overhead on the access they do have. Trust is earned, contextual, and verified.

Configuring Trust Levels

Trust levels are configured per action category in your SafeClaw policy:

``yaml


trust_levels:
  file_read: logged
  file_write: monitored
  shell_command: monitored
  network_request: approval_required
  package_install: approval_required

Full configuration details are in our documentation. The trust system implementation is on GitHub.

Trust but verify isn't a compromise between autonomy and safety. It's the recognition that both are essential, and the right architecture can deliver both.