If your business wants AI agents moving money, changing production systems or working with customer data, you're probably the one being asked to sign off on it. For most of what an agent does, checking each action against policy is enough. For a handful of high-stakes actions, you want a named person to approve that exact action before it runs.
We've partnered with iProov on the human approval service they launched on 22 October to cover that. It launched with two integrations, agentgateway, the open source AI agent gateway from solo.io, and the Cerbos authorization management platform. Here's how it works and where it fits in your AI agent controls.
Why high-risk AI agent actions still need a named human approver
Companies already work this way with people. A large payment needs a second signature. A production change needs someone to sign off. When an agent is doing the work, the same rule has to hold, and the approval has to come from the right person.
iProov's answer is to tie each approval to a live genuine human presence check. As Andrew Bud, iProov's founder and CEO, puts it, "Because no matter how smart they become, agents will never have faces."
How human approval for AI agents works with Cerbos and iProov
Cerbos checks each AI agent action against the rules your team sets. When those rules call for a person's approval, the action is held and iProov takes over.
iProov shows the named approver exactly what the agent wants to do, for example a payment amount and where it's going. The approver confirms it's really them with a genuine human presence check, and iProov issues a signed, single-use credential tied to that one action. If the amount or the destination changes, the credential stops matching and the action is blocked.
Your team still writes and reviews the rules, so the decision about which actions need a person stays in your policies. The service is built on iProov’s Human Approval and Presence Specification (HAPS), published on GitHub in September 2026.
What a verified human approval adds to your AI agent audit trail
When someone asks after the fact why an agent made a payment, you want two things on record, the policy that required approval and the person who gave it. Cerbos Hub audit logs record every decision along with the policy version behind it. iProov's service produces a signed approval record tied to the action. That gives you evidence an auditor can check, not a screenshot or a chat thread.
Regulators are asking similar questions. Article 14 of the EU AI Act requires that high-risk AI systems can be effectively overseen by people, and we've written about what that means for agent authorization and for teams working under DORA.
Which AI agent actions should require human approval
Keep the list short. If every action needs a sign-off, approvers start clicking through without reading, and you lose the speed you deployed the agent for. Keep human approval for actions that are hard to undo, like payments above a threshold, changes to production and bulk exports of customer data. Let policy handle the rest, and adjust as you see how the agent behaves.
This is the dimmer switch approach to agent governance. You widen or narrow what an agent can do as trust builds, instead of choosing between full access and switching it off. Human approval for the highest risk actions is one more setting on that dial, and it's how you give agents more of the work while a person stays in charge of the big calls.
Congratulations to Andrew Bud and the iProov team on the launch. You can find iProov on our partner page.
Book a call to work out which of your agent actions need a person's approval and how the policies would look, or try Cerbos to see every authorization decision and the policy behind it.
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