How to stop an AI agent from burning $47,000 in a loop nobody noticed.

Short summary

A multi-agent system can silently burn thousands of dollars per day in recursive loops while passing all health checks, because cost controls are usually monitoring alerts or agent-internal logic that the agent can bypass. The fix is a hard spend ceiling enforced outside the agent before tool calls execute, using rate limits and daily budgets that pause calls rather than alert retroactively.

• •Agent systems can incur massive costs silently for days while appearing healthy because cost monitoring happens post-facto
• •Agent-internal spend checks fail because runaway agents won't enforce their own limits; billing alerts only work after money is spent
• •Solution: enforce spend caps outside the agent at the tool-call boundary using rate limits and daily budgets that defer over-limit calls

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