Consent Fatigue
Consent fatigue is the desensitization that occurs when users are asked to approve too many individual actions, leading them to rubber-stamp approvals without reading them. In the context of AI agents, it is the predictable failure mode of per-action confirmation prompts used as a substitute for policy-based governance.
Why It Matters
Every per-action approval prompt carries a cost: the user's attention. When an agent generates dozens of approval requests in a session, the user stops reading and starts clicking "approve" reflexively. The security control is present in form but absent in function.
The pattern is well-documented in cookie consent banners, mobile app permissions, and OAuth consent screens. Agents amplify this effect because they generate approval requests at machine speed.
Policy-based governance addresses consent fatigue by removing humans from low-risk decisions entirely. Deterministic policies auto-approve actions that meet defined criteria and escalate only the actions that genuinely require human judgment.