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Recipe: Stop Budget Runaway

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Goal

Prevent an agent from entering a recursive loop that burns tokens and budget.

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Threats / failures this prevents

  • Token runaway (infinite planning / tool loops)
  • Unexpected budget spikes
  • Reliability collapse due to long-running sessions

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Policy intent (high level)

  • If budget class is free and requested tokens exceed limit → TRANSFORM (clamp)
  • If estimated spend exceeds remaining budget → DENY
  • If required cost signals are missing → DEGRADE to conservative defaults
  • TRANSFORM for token clamps
  • DEGRADE for conservative defaults
  • DENY when spend would exceed hard limits
  • COST_TOKEN_CLAMP_FREE_TIER
  • COST_BUDGET_EXCEEDED
  • REL_SAFE_DEFAULTS_APPLIED

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Audit evidence to capture

  • original vs effective values (clamped tokens)
  • decision + reason codes
  • correlation identifiers
  • cost metadata (estimated_usd, tokens)
Golden corpus cases should include boundary values (exactly at limit) and missing-input cases.
  • /policy/golden-corpus
  • /policy/risk-scores
  • /audit/cost-metadata