Overwhelming Human-in-the-Loop

Attackers exploit human oversight dependencies by flooding reviewers with excessive intervention requests, inducing decision fatigue and rushed, less-scrutinised approvals. In a multi-agent system: A multi-agent pipeline surfaces a burst of near-simultaneous approval requests to a single reviewer, who — under time pressure — approves several without the scru…

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Content type

Concept

Theoretical construct: explains a term, principle, or mental model.

Classification level

Structure

What organizes, connects, or makes decisions possible.

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In brief

Overwhelming HITL in brief

Overwhelming HITL describes a human-in-the-loop pattern in which people must handle so many review or approval decisions that oversight itself becomes a bottleneck.

Where does it come from?

The term combines human-in-the-loop with the observation that agentic systems can shift risk onto people through frequent or poorly grouped requests. OWASP discusses this risk in the context of agentic AI threats and mitigations.

The mental model

Imagine a control room that asks for approval of every small action: a person remains involved but can no longer review the volume carefully. Risk-based thresholds, batching, and escalation keep oversight workable.

Key building blocks

Review load

The number and complexity of human decisions can exceed available attention.

Guardrails

Rules and thresholds define which actions run automatically and which require approval.

Escalation

Uncertain or consequential cases are routed deliberately to people.

When is it useful?

The pattern shows that human oversight can fail through overload. Teams should design risk-based approvals, batch decisions, and monitor actual review quality.

OWASP GenAI – Agentic AI Threats and Mitigations

Why is this building block relevant?

Attackers exploit human oversight dependencies by flooding reviewers with excessive intervention requests, inducing decision fatigue and rushed, less-scrutinised approvals.