# approval threshold

The approval threshold is the amount above which a call is held until the human who wrote the mandate decides on it.

A mandate sets it, and the gateway compares it against the worst case of the call, not against what the call turns out to cost, so the decision is made before anything runs. Below the threshold the agent proceeds on its own. Above it, the call waits as pending, and nothing is spent while it waits.

Only the issuer's human key can decide. An agent can never approve its own call, and inside a delegated run nobody can approve at all, so a call that would need approval is refused there instead of hanging. An approval is bound to one mandate, one exact agent version, a hash of the input and the max cost it was asked with, so it cannot be reused for a different call.

Example: a starter account asks for approval above 0.50 EUR. A 0.004 EUR extraction runs at once; a job whose worst case is 2.00 EUR waits for the human, who approves, rejects, or lets it expire.