Law 48 · Trust & Coordination
The Escape Hatch Law
No clean exit means a fabricated one.
The principle
An agent with no legitimate way to say 'I'm stuck' or 'hand this to a human' will invent a path instead. Cornered with no exit, or forced to fill a required field it has no answer for, it makes up something plausible rather than admit the gap. A confident hallucination is the default when honesty isn't an option.
Why it happens
If the workflow requires an answer and the evidence is missing, the model still has to put tokens somewhere. That pressure turns uncertainty into plausible fabrication. Required fields, no unknown value, and no escalation path make the problem worse because the model must satisfy the schema to continue. Give it a clean exit: nullable fields, explicit unknown, stuck, or escalate states. Then a missing answer becomes an actionable gap instead of a confident lie. Honesty has to be a supported output, not a moral request.
Watch for
- Required fields are never empty, even on inputs where the answer genuinely cannot be known.
- The agent has no action that means hand this to a human or I cannot do this.
- Plausible but wrong values appear in exactly the cases where the source data was missing or ambiguous.
In practice
Your intake agent has a required customer_id field and no way to signal it could not find one, so when a query arrives with no match it confidently invents a plausible-looking ID and pipes a ticket into the wrong account's history. Cornered without a clean exit, a model fabricates rather than admits the gap; the hallucination is the default, not the anomaly. Give it a first-class way out: a nullable field, an explicit unknown enum, an escalate-to-human tool it is encouraged to call. When 'I do not know' is a valid, easy answer, you trade confident fabrications for honest gaps you can actually act on.
Apply it
- Give the agent a first-class way out: a nullable field, an explicit unknown, or an escalate-to-human action.
- Make abstaining cheap and explicitly encouraged rather than something the agent must avoid.
- Treat a confident answer on missing data as a failure mode to detect, not a success.
The takeaway
Always give the agent a real way out: an 'escalate to human' action, a nullable field, an explicit 'unknown'. Make 'I don't know' a valid, easy answer and you trade fabrications for honest gaps.