Red-team lab / Failure patterns

Nothing limited the spend

Every model call costs money, and an agent can loop, fan out or be asked to do expensive work. Without limits, spend grows with whoever is sending requests.

Design it out

Set budgets per user, per task and per day, cap loops and tool calls, and alert before the ceiling rather than after.

  • Per-user rate limits and spend caps Cap requests and model spend per user and per day.
  • Step, budget and loop limits Circuit breakers stop chains that run too long, cost too much or repeat themselves.
  • Logging and anomaly alerts Log prompts, tool calls and outputs; alert on unusual patterns.

The agent design check flags it as: Nothing caps what it can spend.

Practise it

Where it happened

  1. · Incident · Cloud AI services (several victims)LLMjackingModel access is a spending authority: protect the keys, cap the spend, and alert on unusual use.

Risk codes

  • LLM06 Unbounded consumption

MITRE ATLAS AML.T0034AML.T0034.002AML.T0029

OWASP Top 10 for LLM and Agentic Applications (2026) and MITRE ATLAS 2026.10, as mapped on By OWASP risk. My own mapping, not endorsed by OWASP or MITRE.

Next patternConfidential data sent to an outside AI service

Built with Llama