Human Oversight in Agentic AI: Authority, Interaction, and Failure Containment

Authors

  • Brian Baker Author

Keywords:

agentic AI, human oversight, autonomous agents, safety, auditability

Abstract

This perspective examines human oversight in agentic artificial-intelligence systems. The organizing question is where authority should reside when planning, delegation, tool use, and recovery are distributed across agents. Ten related scholarly sources are synthesized through a decision-centered framework spanning problem definition, mechanism, measurement, evaluation, implementation, and governance. The review does not invent experiments, pooled estimates, or unreported quantitative results. It instead evaluates the strength and transferability of the available evidence, with particular attention to assuming that adding a human approval step guarantees meaningful control. The resulting framework links technical or empirical performance to explicit use conditions and identifies tests that should precede wider adoption in agentic systems acting on organizational resources.

References

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Published

2026-08-05

Issue

Vol. 1 (2026): Archive

Section

Perspective

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Copyright (c) 2026 Machine Intelligence & Responsible Systems

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