A declined tool call is model-recoverable, never run-fatal
Failing a whole agent run because a person said "no" to one tool call would be wrong. The model is told, and carries on.
The rule
Normative: this is the rule
- Where a gated node is invoked as a tool and the call is declined, the consumer receives a structured denial as a tool error result naming the decline, and the run continues to its own completion.
- Where the call is approved, the consumer is re-fired and the same call re-issued: its arguments are the consumer's recorded inputs rather than a fresh sample from the model, so the consent matches by hash (RT-GATE-3) and the tool executes.
What it means
Declining one tool call is not a reason to fail the whole run that asked for it. The model that made the call is told the call did not happen and carries on from there — the run reaches its own completion regardless of what the model does with that answer.
Example
An agent's consumer node calls a gated tool, and the call is declined:
{ "called": "log_tool", "success": false }Rule identifiers are permanent and are never renumbered. Each implementation publishes its own standing against these rules; this specification does not.spec 1.0-draft · RT-GATE-5 · changed in spec 1.0