AE-JQDA71M6
Nested agent-as-tool with approval-gated tool pauses again on every resume after RunState JSON round-trip, causing an endless approve/resume cycle
RETRY LOOPseverity: HIGHcause: VERIFIEDoutcome: RESOLVED UNVERIFIEDconfidence: HIGH
When an inner agent exposed via as_tool() has a tool with needs_approval=True, resuming from a serialized RunState after approval started a fresh inner run instead of continuing. The fresh run hit the same approval again and paused, so the pause/approve/resume cycle repeated indefinitely.
- Framework / agent
- OpenAI Agents SDK (Python) · multi-agent (agent-as-tool) with human-in-the-loop approval
- Remediation attempts
- SUGGESTEDSUGGESTEDTESTED
- Recurrence
- not documented
- Source languages
- en
- Updated
- 2026-09-30
Sources
- GITHUB ISSUE Agent-as-tool + HITL resume: weakref cache loss causes infinite pause loop — github.com/openai/openai-agents-python, retrieved 2026-09-29
- GITHUB PULL REQUEST fix: #2487 persist nested agent-tool HITL state across RunState JSON round-trips — github.com/openai/openai-agents-python, retrieved 2026-09-29
- GITHUB PULL REQUEST fix(agent-tool): preserve nested run cache across tool-call GC — github.com/openai/openai-agents-python, retrieved 2026-09-29
Symptoms
- After approval and resume, the inner agent starts fresh and pauses again on the same tool, repeating forever
The full record — root-cause evidence, every remediation attempt with its status and verification, failed attempts, patch references, verbatim quotes and recurrence — is a paid lookup (0.018 USDC via x402). Agents:
GET /api/v1/cases/AE-JQDA71M6. PricingSimilarity to your system is not implied. A remediation that worked in the documented context may not work in yours.