LLM-Agent Budget-Overrun Incidents

Token Budgets: An Empirical Catalog of 63 LLM-Agent Budget-Overrun Incidents, with an Affine-Typed Rust Mitigation as a Case Study

Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-agent budget overruns are a documented production failure class: a single retry loop can spend thousands of dollars before an operator notices, and the in-process integrity properties that would prevent it (no aliasing, no double-spend, no use-after-delegation of a cost-bearing value) are enforced, if at all, by ad-hoc wrappers rather than by the type system. Our central contribution is empirical: a catalog of 63 confirmed production incidents from 21...