Approving Actions
The AI can act for you: in the apps you connect through Connectors, like sending an email or creating an issue, and in Pentos itself, like posting in a channel, creating a task, or saving a memory. Before it does anything that changes your data, Pentos pauses and asks you to approve it first. Reading and searching happen automatically; creating, sending, updating, and deleting wait for your go-ahead.
This keeps you in control. The AI can move quickly on the safe things and check in with you before anything consequential.
How Approval Works
When the AI wants to run an action that needs your sign-off, it pauses mid-response and shows an approval card right in the chat, on the step for that action. You see what the AI is about to do (open Details for a summary of the action), along with three choices:
- Approve: Run this action once, right now. The AI continues as soon as it finishes.
- Always approve: Run it now and stop asking for this specific tool from now on. Use this for actions you trust and do often.
- Deny: Skip the action. The AI carries on with the rest of your request without running it. If you deny three actions in the same response, the AI stops taking actions for the rest of that response.
The AI waits while the card is open, so take your time. If you leave the chat, the card is still waiting when you come back. If you do not respond within 2 hours, the action is skipped and the AI moves on.
What Needs Approval
Not every action interrupts you. Pentos only asks when an action could change something.
| Action type | Examples | Approval |
|---|---|---|
| Read-only | Summarize emails, list calendar events, search your files, search the web | Runs automatically |
| Code runs | Analyze a spreadsheet, make a chart | Runs automatically |
| Create or update | Send an email, post a channel message, create a task, generate an image, save a memory | Asks first |
| Destructive | Delete a record, forget a memory | Asks first |
Both routine and destructive actions take a single approval to run, and the type of each one is recorded in your approval history so you can review what happened later. Anything you have set to Always approve runs without asking.
Approving in Shared Chats
In a shared chat, only the person who sent the message can approve its actions. Everyone else sees that the chat is awaiting the sender’s approval. This makes sure actions run against the right person’s accounts, with their permission. See Sharing & Permissions for how shared chats work.
Managing Your Approvals
To review your history and the tools you have auto-approved, head to Settings, select Chats from the left sidebar, open the Connectors tab, and switch to Approvals. There you will find:
- Auto-approved tools: Every tool you chose Always approve for. Click the trash icon next to one and confirm to start requiring approval again.
- Approval history: A dated log of your decisions (approved, denied, timed out, or cancelled), grouped by day. Click any entry to see the details.
Privacy and Security
You always have the final say on what the AI does.
- Nothing runs without your approval: A pending action is held and never executed until you approve it. Deny it or let it expire and it never runs.
- You only approve your own actions: In a shared chat, only the sender can decide, and that decision is tied to a verified identity, not anything sent from the browser.
- You can change your mind anytime: Revoking an auto-approved tool in Approvals makes it ask again the next time.
- Your decisions are recorded for you: Each approval is saved to your private history so you can see exactly what ran and when. Only you can see it, and the details stored are a short, encrypted summary with passwords and keys removed, never the full contents of the action.
Tips
- Approve once, or always: If you find yourself approving the same action repeatedly, like sending Slack messages, use Always approve to skip the prompt going forward.
- Use Deny to redirect: Denying an action does not end the chat. Deny it, then tell the AI what to do instead.
- Review your grants now and then: The Approvals tab is the one place to see and trim everything you have auto-approved.
- Read before you approve: The card shows a summary of what the AI wants to do. Give it a quick read first, especially for anything that deletes something.