AI Operations · Glossary
Consequential Tool
A Consequential Tool is a Tool whose invocation produces an external effect, including payments, transactions, notifications, and writes to systems of record.
Consequentiality is the dimension that classifies Tools for governance. A read-only Tool returns data and produces no external effect. A Consequential Tool moves money, sends communication, opens or closes accounts, modifies regulated records, or commits to a counterparty. Consequential Tools are governed under tighter authored conditions. Tool Gating is mandatory and typically multi-condition. Policy Criticality on the gating Policies is High, meaning Deterministic Enforcement applies. Every invocation is logged in the production trace with full input and output. The class distinction is a first-class governance primitive, not an annotation.