AI agents now produce work — code, support replies, claims decisions, research memos, documents — faster than any team can review it. The uncomfortable part: most models are aligned to be helpful and agreeable, so an agent tends to approve its own output. At any real scale, that means unreviewed agent work reaches production.
The fix isn't "review everything by hand" (you can't) or "trust the model" (it's the thing being checked). It's an acceptance gate: an automated checkpoint between an agent and production that grades each output against an explicit policy and decides what happens to it.
The four-band acceptance model
A useful gate doesn't return a vibe — it returns a score and one of four decisions, so the outcome is policy-bound and auditable:
ship — meets the policy; accept it.
