When Evidence Becomes a Veto: Procedural Objectives and Decision-Authority Inflation in LLM Agents

We study decision-authority inflation: the autonomous promotion of a non-dispositive signal into a rule for whether justified downstream work should continue. Controlled planning tasks separate a legitimate blocker L, which truly can stop the target, from an observation N, which may inform interpretation but should not veto continuation.

Qwen3-8B frequently lets unfavorable N terminate the target under implicit decision context. Clarifying downstream value, feasibility, or decision authority sharply reduces this pruning while the model continues to branch on N, separating information use from action authority. A length-matched factorial isolates a strong interaction: in the key L+,N− cell, evaluative future evidence yields 50% STOP, whereas settled evaluative evidence yields 0% and opaque future evidence 2%; the primary graded difference-in-differences is +12.54 STOP-vs-PROCEED logits, or 1.48 pooled within-scene standard deviations.