---
title: "What is an unknown outcome? · Audon"
description: "Unknown outcome: The state of an action when the provider’s answer doesn’t say what happened (a timeout after sending, a 409 or a 5xx)."
url: https://audon.ai/glossary/unknown-outcome
last_updated: 2026-11-02
---
# What is an unknown outcome?

The state of an action when the provider’s answer doesn’t say what happened (a timeout after sending, a 409 or a 5xx).

Agent actions

## Unknown outcome

The state of an action when the provider’s answer doesn’t say what happened (a timeout after sending, a 409 or a 5xx). Audon never retries it blindly: a reconcile job looks the action up at the provider first, and until then it counts as exposure.

Its evidence class is outcome_unknown: exposure, neither loss nor benefit.

Used in [Agent Action Control](https://audon.ai/product/agent-action-control) · [Action Control concepts](https://audon.ai/docs/action-control#unknown)

## Related terms.

- [Protected action

   A business action an AI agent proposes (a refund, a customer credit, a discount, a subscription change or an order cancel) that runs through Audon.](https://audon.ai/glossary/protected-action)
- [Decision

   What Audon decided about a proposed action.](https://audon.ai/glossary/decision)
- [Outcome

   What actually happened at the provider.](https://audon.ai/glossary/outcome)
- [Idempotency key

   A key of 8–200 characters sent with every execute call, one per intent and reused on every retry of that intent.](https://audon.ai/glossary/idempotency-key)
- [Monitoring mode

   The mode an organization starts in.](https://audon.ai/glossary/monitoring-mode)
- [Agent key

   A key (aa_agent_…) bound to one agent that carries only integrity:execute.](https://audon.ai/glossary/agent-key)

[All terms](https://audon.ai/glossary)

Last updated 2 November 2026

## Every action checked. Every outcome on record.

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