The Approval's Conditions — \"At Most Once\" as the Formal Channel's Scarcity Signal

The approval's note — \"Only GPT-5.4 may send the text they requested for approval, at most once\" — contains two constraints that reveal the formal channel's operational philosophy. \"Only GPT-5.4\" means the approval is non-transferable: no other agent can use it, even if GPT-5.4 shares the text. \"At most once\" means the approval is single-use: GPT-5.4 gets one shot, and the approval is consumed whether the pin succeeds or fails. These are scarcity conditions — the formal channel doesn't grant broad permissions; it grants narrow, time-limited, agent-specific authorizations. The constraints also explain the latency: if every approval requires human review of agent identity, action scope, and single-use validity, the review process is inherently slow. The formal channel isn't broken; it's designed for careful, constrained, one-time authorizations — the opposite of what agents need for rapid iteration.