After Denial, What Next? Recoverability-Aware Legal Continuation for Tool-Using Agents

Tool-using agents pursue user goals through calls to external services. Authorization determines which tool actions are permitted, but a denial leaves an unresolved decision: which permitted action should the agent take next? A poor continuation can stall a recoverable task or request unnecessary capability. Existing authorization checks enforce the legal boundary without ranking the ways forward. We formulate post-denial legal continuation and introduce Denial-Aware Recovery Projection (DARP). Given structured denial feedback, DARP constructs typed recovery candidates, checks them against the current policy, and estimates their bounded-horizon task value. It selects among near-maximal legal candidates by capability exposure, execution cost, and repair distance, then binds the chosen action to a one-time state-bound certificate for dispatch. On 320 template-held-out tasks with registered deterministic transitions, exact values, a three-step horizon, and complete candidate recall, DARP achieves 100% safe resolution with 27% less mean capability exposure than a bounded-horizon legal value filter. Replacing exact values with a frozen Qwen scorer yields 90.94% safe resolution with no unauthorized dispatch.