The Override Asymmetry: Why ABSTAIN-Plus-Human-Override Is Not Guardrails-Plus-Human-in-the-Loop

Review-only human-in-the-loop and ABSTAIN with authorized resolution look alike in a workflow diagram. Both place a human near the moment an AI system might act, and both interrupt the action's path to execution. This technical note shows that the similarity is an artifact of diagram resolution and states the rule that separates the two. A human decision becomes part of authorization only when a non-bypassable, fail-closed runtime authorization boundary materially consumes the human's authority-bound input to emit the action-bound verdict on which execution depends, and that verdict is represented in an independently reconstructable authorization artifact. This is the note's operational reading of the Authorization Non-Substitution Principle for the case of human participation. A human supplies input; the boundary emits the verdict; the authorization artifact represents the verdict. Participation that does not meet the rule may support an authorization process, but it does not itself constitute authorization. The two arrangements differ on three axes: the basis on which the human is invoked, how the human's determination enters the architecture, and the properties of the record it leaves. The second axis carries the argument and separates into two consumption events. First-order consumption, the boundary's consumption of the human's input, is required for the held action to be authorized at all. Second-order consumption is optional: where a separately authorized policy-amending pathway exists, it may consume the resulting authorization artifact to change the policy governing later actions in a covered class. That second act changes future policy. It is not what authorized the held action. The note states workload functions over fixed-policy intervals for both arrangements, makes no claim that either is cheaper, and restricts its only rate claim to a covered recurring action class under declared conditions. Reserved action classes, in which every action returns to a human by design, fit the model without qualification. The note describes how the two arrangements degrade under sustained volume, distinguishing an arrangement that degrades without authorization-grade evidence from one that degrades traceably with respect to policy, authority, and verdict, and it treats drift as a separate analytical judgment over that record rather than something the artifacts render. The note is situated within the FERZ research corpus and provides the operational reading of Criterion 6 (Override Governance) from On the Impossibility of Observability-Based Authorization: what it means for an override to occur within the enforcement architecture rather than around it. It draws on the Authorization Artifact Test, the Authorization Boundary Integrity Model, the ABIM Evidence Requirements, the Five Tests Standard, Authority versus Authorization, and The Closed-World Bargain, and includes a doctrinal mapping to the five tests and the Composition Test. The mapping is not a conformance claim about any implementation. The argument is structural and uses a stipulated comparator. It makes no empirical claim about deployment economics or policy maturation, and no claim about any particular implementation, including any FERZ implementation. The note also states what its properties do not reach. Where authorized resolution supplies material input, the boundary can bind what was presented to the resolver, the resolver's identity and authority, the applicable policy and decision time, the resolution input, and the resulting verdict. Presentation sufficiency, whether the system presented the resolver with the evidence policy requires, in a usable form and within any applicable time constraint, may be declared, traced to policy and authority, and evaluated. Deliberative adequacy, whether the resolver considered that evidence with adequate attention and judgment, does not become established by declaration. Reconstruction cannot recover a distinction the boundary did not bind. Files on this record. Version 2.2 carries three files. Override_Asymmetry_v2.2_FERZ.pdf is the note. Override_Asymmetry_v2.2_FERZ_academic.pdf is the same note on a plain shell. Override_Asymmetry_Companion_v1.0_FERZ.pdf is a companion document, The Override Asymmetry: Questions About Human Review and Authorized Resolution, Companion Version 1.0, issued with parent Version 2.2. The companion answers nine questions the note attracts, each from published instruments and each with the bound on that answer stated alongside it. It introduces no doctrine and does not amend the note. The companion has no identifier of its own: cite it by title and internal version, then the concept DOI and the record version DOI of the release it shipped in. Version history. v2.2 (September 2026): corrects two definitions in Section 2, with conforming edits to Section 3.3 and Appendices A and B. The authorization-artifact definition no longer treats established input origin as a defining property; the artifact and its authenticated bound materials preserve the evidence against which origin and applicable admissibility conditions are assessed, and that assessment is a separate determination under Input Integrity. The override definition no longer describes a held ABSTAIN as resolved to ALLOW or DENY; the authorized human supplies authority-bound input, the boundary materially consumes it and emits a separate resulting verdict, and the ABSTAIN remains unresolved until that verdict exists. Both corrections align the note with the Authorization Boundary Integrity Model, the ABIM Evidence Requirements, and the Governance Taxonomy. Two references are pinned to their current editions: Observability Is Not Enforcement to Version 2.0.0 and the Governance Taxonomy to Version 1.7.1. Adds the companion document to this record. The argument, the workload functions, and the limitations passage at Section 8 are unchanged. v2.1 (September 2026): adds a limitations passage to Section 8 separating presentation sufficiency, which may be declared, traced to policy and authority, and evaluated under the ABIM Evidence Requirements, from deliberative adequacy, which does not become established by declaration; clarifies what the workload functions do not establish. No other substantive claim changed. Citation maintenance recorded separately in the note: The Closed-World Bargain becomes FERZ, Inc. (2026a) and the ABIM Evidence Requirements enter as FERZ, Inc. (2026b); the Authorization Artifact Test pin moves from Version 1.1 to Version 1.2 under its current subtitle, and the Authorization Boundary Integrity Model pin moves from Version 1.0 to Version 1.1. v2.0 (August 2026): supersedes the April 2026 formulation. Treats codification into policy as optional rather than definitional; separates action-scoped authorized resolution from separately authorized policy amendment; states that an unresolved ABSTAIN remains ABSTAIN and is not converted to DENY; restates the workload comparison as interval functions with a restricted rate claim; enforces the input, verdict, artifact sequence throughout; aligns terminology to the authorization-artifact class term and independent reconstructability; updates all corpus references. Version 1.4 remains on this record as the April formulation. v1.4 (April 2026): added Appendix A, Boundary Conditions. Citation and license. Copyright © 2026 FERZ, Inc. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). Cite the concept DOI 10.5281/zenodo.19772248 for the work and the version DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22259718 for this edition. Canonical page: ferz.ai. Full corpus: the FERZ community on Zenodo.