As AI agents become increasingly capable of taking actions on behalf of people, iProov is introducing a new framework designed to help organizations verify when a human has actually approved a specific action.
The biometric identity verification company has published the Human Approval and Presence Specification (HAPS), an experimental procedural specification that aims to strengthen human oversight in agentic AI systems. Available openly on GitHub under the Apache-2.0 license, HAPS provides a set of rules for verifying human approval before an AI agent can carry out sensitive or critical actions.
Making Human Approval Verifiable
HAPS addresses a growing challenge in AI governance: an AI agent may have permission to access certain tools or services, but that permission does not necessarily prove that a human intended or approved a particular action. Unintended actions can arise from issues such as prompt injection, excessive goal-seeking, or misuse of delegated credentials.
Rather than requiring approval for every AI action, HAPS proposes applying additional verification only to actions that organizations consider sensitive or high-risk. The process involves pausing the action, showing the human exactly what the AI agent intends to do, obtaining evidence of genuine human presence and approval, and verifying that the approval corresponds to the specific action.
“HAPS is a specification that makes that human approval verifiable,” said Andrew Bud, founder and CEO of iProov. He added that the company is releasing the framework at an experimental stage to encourage industry experts to scrutinize, challenge, and build on the approach.
HAPS is proof-agnostic, meaning it does not require a particular method for verifying human presence. iProov has developed an internal implementation using biometric liveness as one possible approach.
The specification also includes a partial Rust reference implementation and test vectors, allowing developers and organizations to explore independent implementations. Bud is set to present the design requirements behind HAPS at AGNTCon + MCPCon Europe in Amsterdam on September 17–18.
The HAPS specification, reference implementation, and test materials are now available through GitHub.