Unbounded consumption
Excessive, uncontrolled use of an AI service that degrades it or runs up costs, including denial of wallet.
Unbounded consumption is the OWASP GenAI Security Project's name for applications that allow excessive and uncontrolled inference, which can degrade service, exhaust resources or impose large costs. One variant it names is denial of wallet, where an attacker exploits the cost-per-use model of cloud AI services. Agents are exposed because they loop through model and tool calls, so limits on turns, budgets, retries and request rates act as security controls as well as budgets.
Agent Minute explains this term on 6 March 2027.
Related terms
Excessive agencyGiving an LLM application more functions, permissions or autonomy than needed, so bad outputs cause harmful actions.Prompt injectionAn attack that alters what a model receives so that it follows the attacker's instructions instead of its user's.Red-teamingStructured adversarial testing of an AI system to find flaws, harmful behaviours and vulnerabilities before attackers do.Spend limitA cap on how much an agent may pay, enforced by the system that executes the payment, not by the agent.