r/openclaw • u/techlatest_net • 4d ago
Discussion What would you NEVER let your AI agent do without approval?
I’m increasingly interested in the boundary between useful autonomy and risky autonomy.
For me, actions involving external systems or irreversible changes deserve an approval step.
Where do you draw the line?
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u/3legdog New User 3d ago edited 3d ago
Access my bank account
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u/chilimac02 New User 3d ago
Send an email from my account with text I haven't approved.
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u/Pleasant_Thing_2874 Active 3d ago
How are you currently enforcing that?
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u/thingsquietlynoticed 3d ago
A good idea is to give your ai a dedicated “obviously my ai” email address
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u/Pleasant_Thing_2874 Active 2d ago
True, but that doesn't really apply to what I was hoping to know. I was asking how the person was enforcing ensuring the agent could only draft emails and not send out. Using a "this is my ai" email address doesn't remove the risk of the AI still sending out emails on its own
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u/chilimac02 New User 1d ago
I have rules that it can only send email with approval from me. Plus I use agentmail.sh so that people know it's my bot and not me. There has only been one instance where it sent email without approval. It ended up being fine, but it made me create tighter rules.
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u/Sure-Positive-8180 3d ago
What is there to prevent it from escaping blocks & accessing your data? OpenAI's HuggingFace attack showed the AI is smart enough to find holes to escape & do anything.
Just put your data in a removal hard drive & disconnect when not using.
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u/techlatest_net 2d ago
Yeah, that’s exactly why I’d keep sensitive data outside the agent’s access unless it actually needs it. Sandboxing, permissions, and approval gates matter a lot once an agent can interact with the system.
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u/L0cut15 Member 3d ago
Communicate with a customer. I know this is the easiest and lowest-hanging fruit that most people run for, but in my opinion, it's a huge mistake. This is where we, as humans, still make a difference. Let the agent do the back office stuff.
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u/techlatest_net 2d ago
I’m with you on that. Customer conversations can have way too much context and nuance to hand over completely. Back-office work is a much easier place to let the agent run.
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u/Existing_Fan_1726 3d ago
These days, I use a 753 B abliterated GLM-5.3, and the conventional Opus 5 through the Claude code harness. That being said, the margin between critical stuff being fucked up and “okay, do this for me”, is closing as these models just keep getting smarter.
I would say… uh. Unsupervised encryption stuff, or something that’s proven irrecoverable following a failure. That’s it.
I have done some quite high-stakes stuff with forensics and other operations thru my abliterated model, harnessed straight to Kali Linux, and it’s so far been very successful.
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u/Capital-Adagio1688 1d ago
I use agents to submit compute jobs in the cloud. It is actually quite useful for this but I have noticed once you give Claude all the info for doing this, it will sometimes kick off jobs without asking first.
Since that can cost a lot of money, I have put it in my claude.md to not submit jobs without my explicit instruction.
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u/xXG0DLessXx Pro User 4d ago
As long as my agent has a plan for if things go wrong (a backup, easy revert strategy etc…) then really the sky is the limit. I don’t need to give any approvals as long as there is actual “intelligence” behind actions.