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How It Works

HaltState uses a three-layer governance system designed to handle the full spectrum of agent actions - from routine operations to edge cases that require human judgment. The goal: you only see the decisions that actually need you.

Agent Action
HaltState
Policy Engine
AI Council
Human (rare)

The Three Layers

1 Policy Engine

Your rules, enforced automatically. Define policies in plain English like "Allow all read operations" or "Deny access to production databases" or "Require approval for payments over $1,000".

Actions matching your policies are handled instantly - allowed or denied in under 50ms with no human intervention needed. The vast majority of agent actions are handled at this layer.

Policy outcomes:

  • ALLOW - Action proceeds immediately
  • DENY - Action is blocked with reason
  • APPROVAL_REQUIRED - Action queued for review
Instant · Automatic · Configurable

2 AI Consensus Council

When an action doesn't match any explicit policy, it enters the Consensus Council - a panel of independent AI judges that evaluate the request against your organization's intent and risk profile.

Each judge operates independently, analyzing:

  • The action being requested and its parameters
  • The context and history of the agent session
  • Your organization's policies and stated intent
  • Potential risks and edge cases

Council thresholds:

  • 80%+ agreement to approve - Action is auto-approved
  • 80%+ agreement to reject - Action is auto-denied
  • 50%+ disagreement - Escalate to human oversight

This handles the long tail of edge cases without flooding your team with approval requests.

Intelligent · Multi-model · Consensus-driven

3 Human Oversight

Only truly ambiguous decisions reach your team. When AI judges disagree (50%+ split), the action is escalated for human review.

What you see:

  • Full context of the action request
  • Each judge's reasoning and vote
  • Risk assessment and relevant policies
  • One-click approve or deny

In practice, this means you're reviewing the genuinely hard cases, not rubber-stamping routine operations. Most organizations see less than 5% of actions reaching human review.

Final authority · Full context · Rare escalation

Why Three Layers?

Single-layer governance systems force a tradeoff: either you approve everything (bottleneck) or you allow everything matching basic rules (risky). HaltState's three-layer approach gives you:

Audit Trail

Every decision at every layer is cryptographically logged:

This creates the verifiable evidence you need for compliance audits - not just logs that claim things happened, but Proof Packs that prove it.

Because trust isn't a setting. It's an architecture.

Next Steps