Managing AI token costs and denial-of-wallet risk
🧭 Companies rapidly adopted AI agents, but unpredictable and spiking token consumption has created financial, reliability, and security challenges. Automated processes exposed to external inputs can be weaponized as a new form of DDoS that drives up usage fees. As pay-as-you-go billing replaces flat subscriptions, organizations face surprise overspend and need FinOps-like practices tailored to probabilistic generative AI. Practical measures include restricting agent permissions, setting token limits and alerts, validating external inputs, and calculating per-unit costs to detect billing anomalies.
