Approval Queues & Escalation Chains(AQE)

First-class approval and escalation as an operational workflow rather than a single blocking gate. Actions are tiered by risk: reversible actions auto-approve, medium-risk actions go to asynchronous review where the agent persists its state, continues other work, and rehydrates when a decision arrives, and irreversible actions require synchronous approval before execution. Escalation is triggered by explicit signals including confidence breaches, an irreversibility flag, SLA-approach, and anomaly or injection detection, and routes the decision to a higher-authority adjudicator (a human, a more-privileged agent, or an external workflow). Distinct from `human-in-the-loop`: HITL is the generic synchronous stance, whereas this pattern adds risk tiering, asynchronous queueing with state rehydration, and adjudicator routing.