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Add declarative human-in-the-loop policy hints for tool execution

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
28/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Quiet
Tech stack
javascript
Domain
documentation

Research direction

Start with the proposal's ToolAnnotations schema and the registerTool example to understand the intended annotation. The work also needs resolution of the enum versus booleans, default behavior, read-only interaction, and normative guidance; completion requires an agreed schema plus minimal examples and non-normative safety guidance.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

enhancement

Problem

WebMCP tools have vastly different risk profiles (e.g., a read-only search vs. sending a payment or deleting data). Currently, there is no declarative way for a web application to communicate its expected Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) policy per tool.

Without a structured signal, User Agents (UAs) must infer risk from natural-language descriptions or tool names, leading to inconsistent UX or unsafe assumptions.

Proposal

Add an optional, advisory humanInTheLoopHint to ToolAnnotations.

enum ToolHumanInTheLoopPolicy {
  "none",     // Safe to run autonomously (e.g., read-only lookup)
  "notify",   // Run autonomously but notify user (e.g., temporary UI preference)
  "review",   // Requires preview/summary before finalizing (e.g., staging a draft)
  "confirm"   // Requires explicit approval (e.g., sending email, deleting a file)
};

dictionary ToolAnnotations {
  boolean readOnlyHint = false;
  boolean untrustedContentHint = false;
  ToolHumanInTheLoopPolicy humanInTheLoopHint = "confirm"; 
};
Example Usage
document.modelContext.registerTool({
  name: "email.createDraft",
  title: "Create email draft",
  inputSchema: { /* ... */ },
  annotations: {
    readOnlyHint: false,
    humanInTheLoopHint: "review" 
  },
  async execute(input) { return await createDraft(input); }
});

Why this matters

  1. UX Consistency: Provides a common vocabulary for tool-level expectations, enabling UAs to render standardized confirmation/review states.
  2. Advisory Nature: This does not replace UA safety frameworks. The UA can always ignore the hint or enforce a stricter policy (e.g., forcing a confirm on sensitive actions even if the site requests none).

Open Questions

  1. Should this be a single enum or separate boolean hints (e.g., requiresConfirmationHint)?
  2. What should the default value be? Should readOnlyHint: true implicitly default to "none"?
  3. Should high-risk categories (payments, external communication) have stricter normative guidance that overrides loose site hints?

Next Steps

If the working group is open to this direction, I can submit a PR adding this annotation schema, minimal examples, and non-normative safety guidance to the spec.

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Forks
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

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