# Human Approval Steps — OpenAI Agent Builder Workflows

Source: https://www.skillbyai.com/en/openai-agent-builder/l-approval

> Pause for a person before risky actions.

## Approve, reject, or time out

A **user approval** step pauses the workflow and asks a person to approve or reject before continuing, for example before issuing a large refund, sending an external email or changing account data. Show the approver exactly what will happen (action, amount, recipient), record who decided and when, and design the **reject** and **timeout** paths, not just the happy path. Model approvals as an explicit state machine so illegal transitions (approving an already rejected request) are impossible.

## Approval as a state machine, run

I ran this with plain Python 3. It is a small model of the workflow idea, not Agent Builder itself, and no model is called. A pending request can move to approved, rejected or escalated (on timeout). Trying to reject an already approved request raises an error instead of silently changing it.

```python
# Human approval as an explicit state machine with a timeout path.
TRANSITIONS = {("pending", "approve"): "approved", ("pending", "reject"): "rejected",
               ("pending", "timeout"): "escalated"}
def step(status, event):
    nxt = TRANSITIONS.get((status, event))
    if nxt is None:
        raise ValueError(f"illegal transition {status} --{event}-->")
    return nxt
for event in ["approve", "reject", "timeout"]:
    print("pending --", event, "->", step("pending", event))
try:
    step("approved", "reject")
except ValueError as e:
    print("blocked:", e)
```

Output:

```
pending -- approve -> approved
pending -- reject -> rejected
pending -- timeout -> escalated
blocked: illegal transition approved --reject-->
```

## Approve the action, not the chat

Show the approver the concrete tool call and parameters, not a summary written by the model.

**Quiz:** Which path is most often forgotten in approval steps?

- [x] What happens on rejection or timeout
- [ ] The approve path
- [ ] The start node
- [ ] The model choice

*Answer:* What happens on rejection or timeout. Design every outcome.