What is Throttling?
Deliberately slowing down agent tool call throughput rather than hard-blocking. A softer alternative to outright denial that allows agents to continue operating at reduced speed, degrading gracefully under load or near policy limits.
WHY IT MATTERS
Hard denial is a blunt instrument. When a rate limit is hit, blocking the call entirely forces the agent into error handling — which may not be graceful. Throttling offers a middle ground: the call is delayed rather than denied, and the agent receives its response, just more slowly.
This is particularly useful for non-critical tool calls where latency is acceptable but failure is not. An agent querying a monitoring dashboard can tolerate a 2-second delay far better than a complete denial. Throttling keeps the agent productive while signalling that it should slow down.
Throttling also prevents the retry storm problem. When agents receive hard denials, they often retry immediately — creating more load. When agents receive delayed responses, they naturally slow down because they are waiting for the response. The proxy controls the pace without relying on the agent to behave well.
In practice, throttling and hard denial are often used together: throttling for soft limits (approaching quota), hard denial for hard limits (quota exceeded) and security violations (forbidden operations).
HOW POLICYLAYER USES THIS
Intercept can introduce artificial latency to tool call responses as a throttling mechanism. The YAML policy defines thresholds — when an agent's call rate approaches the limit, Intercept begins adding delay to responses. This degrades performance gradually rather than cutting off access abruptly, giving the agent a chance to self-regulate.