Expire consent when the original decision would no longer be fair to replay.
The job is not to make every approval disappear quickly. The job is to preserve useful delegation while forcing a fresh review when the facts, scope, or risk profile changes.
The practical model
Start with a narrow consent object: allowed action, evidence hash, account boundary, output target, spending or publishing limit, time window, and revocation path. Then define the conditions that invalidate it. A text-message AI assistant can still ask a compact question, but the agent should store a richer expiry policy behind the reply.
Consent expiry turns approval into a living rule. If the agent resumes and the new state matches the old boundary, it may proceed or ask lightly. If the state changes, it must ask again with a fresh context bundle.
Time expiry
Useful for volatile tasks such as checkout, booking windows, or short-lived browser sessions.
State expiry
Trigger a new ask when page content, file diff, account state, or extracted evidence changes.
Scope expiry
Invalidate consent when the recipient, amount, account, URL, or action class changes.
Implementation checklist
- Capture the evidence bundle before asking.
- Write the allowed action in plain language.
- Store explicit disallowed actions.
- Choose time, state, scope, or user-revocation expiry.
- Check expiry before every resume.
- Show the operator what changed when asking again.
Common failure mode
The agent treats a previous yes as a broad standing permission. That is especially risky when a browser task resumes after the page has changed, or when generated content is published from stale approval.