How It Works
Closing the loop
Letting an AI system act on its own output without a person reviewing each step — for example, an agent that reads a result, decides what to do next and does it, feeding the outcome back in as the next input. An 'open loop' keeps a person in the middle of each cycle; a 'closed loop' removes that checkpoint, which is why the phrase comes up in discussions of agent reliability and oversight.
Origin · no single documented coiner
Borrowed from control theory, where a closed-loop system uses feedback from its own output to adjust its behavior. No single documented coiner is credited for its use in AI agents.