Agent Cost Circuit Breaker Pattern Guide: How to Stop Runaway AI Spend Before It Starts
An agent cost circuit breaker is an architectural control layer that monitors cost velocity, iteration count, consecutive failures, and scope violations in real time — then terminates execution when thresholds are exceeded, preventing the kind of runaway spend that has produced documented single-incident bills of $437, $47,000, and $2,847 from agents running unsupervised loops. This guide covers the four trigger dimensions, how to implement them at the provider/tool/session level, and why enforcement must live outside agent code at the governance plane. ...