Why it does not change what still needs approval

Raising the effort level never changes what tools are available to the model or what tCode is allowed to do without asking you first; the permission system applies identically regardless of which effort level is currently active.

What changes at a higher effort level is only how carefully the model reasons about which action to take and when to take it, never whether a given action still requires your explicit approval before it runs.

This separation is deliberate: effort and permissions are answering two different questions entirely, described in full in Permissions and safety.

There is no effort level, however high, that grants a tool broader access than it otherwise has, and no effort level, however low, that revokes access a tool would otherwise have. The set of what tCode can even attempt is fixed regardless of this setting.

This means raising effort is always a safe experiment in the sense that matters most: it cannot cause tCode to do something it would not otherwise be allowed to do, it can only change how carefully it reasons about the things it was already permitted to do.