Write safety: why an AI agent can't change your account on its own
The risk that actually matters with an AI agent is not that it reads something it shouldn't — it's that it changes something it shouldn't. Approval is mandatory on every write and there is no autonomous mode to enable, so no configuration drift can quietly remove the gate.
The two checks on every write
- Human approval, mandatory. Bids, budgets, status changes, new campaigns — each pauses and waits for a person, in-app or by email magic-link. There is no setting that turns this off wholesale.
- Stale-state revalidation. The account is re-read immediately before an approved change applies. If the state it was calculated against has moved, the change doesn't fire on old assumptions.
Scope limits per platform
Beyond approval, several platforms are deliberately restricted at the path level rather than by convention. Campaign Manager 360 allows writes to exactly five trafficking collections while Floodlight measurement configuration stays read-only. Search Console is entirely read-only — the agent cannot submit sitemaps or request indexing. Shopify write access only exists if you grant write scopes on the token.
Batch review without losing the gate
A scheduled audit proposing thirty changes used to mean thirty approvals, and approval fatigue is how a gate quietly becomes theatre. Batch review collapses that into one review while keeping per-write validation, and money writes carry an age bound on the data they were calculated from. See the batch approval release.
An audit trail
Each organization has an audit log recording what was proposed, who approved it, and what applied — so a change can be traced after the fact rather than reconstructed from memory.
Frequently asked questions
- Can the AI agent change my ad account without asking?
- No. Human approval is mandatory on every write and there is no autonomous mode to enable, so the gate cannot be configured away.
- What stops an approved change from applying to a changed account?
- The account state is re-read immediately before the change applies. If the basis it was calculated on has moved, the change does not fire on stale assumptions.
- Is there a record of what the agent did?
- Yes — a per-organization audit log records what was proposed, who approved it and what applied.