Check whether an action is permitted by the ConsentGate owner's consent policy BEFORE you perform it. Call this for any potentially sensitive, irreversible, or high-impact action — e.g. sending email or messages, posting publicly, spending money, deleting or overwriting files, calling external/destructive APIs, or changing system state. Returns a decision: "allow" (you may proceed), "deny" (do NOT proceed), or "ask" (no rule matched — not approval; use request_approval to get a human decision, or ask the user). This call does not block. FAIL CLOSED: if the result is anything other than "allow", do not perform the action.

Request a human's explicit approval for an action and BLOCK until they decide or the timeout elapses. Use for high-stakes actions, or whenever check_action returned "ask". The owner gets an Approve/Deny prompt on Telegram. Returns "allow" ONLY if a human tapped Approve. Returns "deny" on tap-deny, on timeout (fail-closed), or when interactive approvals are unavailable (owner not on Pro, or Telegram not linked — see upgrade_required / telegram_linked). NEVER treat a non-"allow" result as permission.