Journal article
Not Acting Is Not One Decision: Two Abstention Triggers in Tool-Using Agents, Why the Calibration and Permission Readings Cover Different Ones, and the Cost Term Neither Supplies
An agent that declines to send the email has made a decision that looks like the decision a language model makes when it declines to answer a question, and the resemblance has organised the 2026 literature into two camps. One reads not-acting as a calibration problem: the agent should estimate its…