PAT-0300 - Escalation Growth

A structural condition where impact, authority, scope, or consequence increases across sequential states without a declared limiting mechanism.

Primary Lenses

LEN-0190 - Escalation Gradient Lens
Measures structural growth or intensification across sequential executions, states, or transitions.
LEN-0290 - Variance / Entropy Lens
Measures structural variability across repeated or comparable evaluations and identifies divergence beyond expected bounds.

LEN-0250 - Propagation Lens
Traces how structural declarations, effects, or state changes propagate across boundaries or stages.

Agent Permission Expands Over Steps
An agent begins with limited permission but gains, assumes, or exercises broader authority as the workflow continues.
Retry Makes the Problem Worse
A retry, repair attempt, regeneration, or follow-up instruction increases the error, expands the failure, or creates additional breakage instead of narrowing the problem.
Review Escalates Without Stop Condition
A review process keeps escalating, re-reviewing, or adding scrutiny without a declared condition for stopping.
Risk Score Triggers Wrong Escalation
A risk score, severity label, confidence value, or threshold result triggers the wrong escalation path.
Risk Signal Escalates Beyond Evidence
A risk signal, warning, score, or concern escalates farther than the available evidence supports.
Severity Increases Without New Evidence
The severity, risk, confidence, or escalation level increases even though no new evidence has been added.
Small Issue Keeps Escalating
A small issue, warning, uncertainty, or correction keeps increasing in severity, scope, or workflow impact across later steps.

Action Triggered by Confidence Score
A confidence score, certainty label, risk level, or probability-like value triggers an action without enough approval, calibration, or authority control.
Downstream Steps Magnify Hallucinated Claim
A hallucinated or unsupported claim from an AI output is reused by later workflow steps until it becomes more influential than the evidence supports.
Model Output Triggers Unapproved Action
AI output causes, recommends, or triggers an action that has not passed the required approval, permission, or authority check.
Repair Step Created New Breakage
A repair, correction, retry, or fix step addresses one problem but introduces a new failure elsewhere.
Routing Path Cycles Back to Start
A routing path sends the case back to the starting point or an earlier step without resolving the condition that caused the route.
Small Error Spreads Into Large Failure
A small AI, output, routing, or workflow error propagates through later steps until it becomes a larger failure.
Too Many Tool Calls
The AI or agent makes more tool calls, searches, retrievals, API calls, or integration actions than the task requires or permits.
Workflow Loops Through Review Without Resolution
A workflow repeatedly sends work through review, repair, or escalation without reaching an approved, rejected, or otherwise resolved state.

0.1.0 — 2026-05-10T00:00:00Z — Created

Promoted reviewed Pattern ontology entry: Escalation Growth.

Receipt impact: None