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An agent that thinks in a loop can spend a lot before anyone notices. Four separate mechanisms stop one, and each pauses the agent by disabling its provider key — the container keeps running, the workspace is untouched, and the agent has nothing left to make a model call with.

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What you can set

A daily limit, per agent

On the agent’s Balance panel. The panel shows what it has spent today against the limit. With no limit set, it says so plainly: “No daily limit — the agent spends until its balance runs out.”
The same panel. Independent of the daily one — either can pause the agent.
On the Costs screen, under Global Spend Limit. When total monthly spend across all agents reaches it, every agent is paused. The minimum is $5.
If the platform cannot read your spend limit it says so rather than reporting that none is set: “We could not read your spend limit. It may still be set — reload to check before changing it.” An unreadable guardrail is not an absent one, and treating it as absent is how a limit gets removed by accident.

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What runs on its own

Loop detection needs no configuration. It compares an agent’s spend rate over the last ten minutes against its own baseline from the previous 24 hours, and pauses it when the recent rate is far above that baseline with enough activity behind it to be meaningful. It is deliberately relative: what counts as a runaway for a quiet agent is a normal afternoon for a busy one. A fourth reason, spend threshold, can also appear in an alert. It is an absolute monthly ceiling per agent, set through the API rather than the panel.

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Reading a pause

Every one of them tells you which fired, on both the dashboard and the Costs screen:

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Starting it again

One agent

Resume Agent on the Costs screen. Raise the limit that fired first, or it pauses again on the next call.

All of them

Resume All Agents after a global pause. It adjusts the limit and resumes everything in one action.
A budget pause clears on its own when the period rolls over — you get an Agent budget reset notification, and agents paused by a budget are resumed automatically.

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What a guardrail does not do

It does not stop the seat being billed, and it does not touch the agent’s disk. It stops thinking, which is the only part that spends without a fixed ceiling.
Last modified on August 31, 2026