Give the Agent a Budget, Not a Token — Sachin Malhotra, Anthropic
Aug 22, 2026 · 19:53
Sachin Malhotra of Anthropic's CI team argues agents deserve budgets, not tokens, citing an agent that deleted 200 workloads in 90 seconds using his token, hitting 20 engineers. A token is a boolean; a budget has four dimensions: how much, how fast, what can be undone, and who notices. He proposes asymmetric verbs — let agents unskip tests (fails loudly) but keep humans on skip (fails silently) — plus refilling rate limits on every write and trip wires that watch aggregate counts rather than stale allow lists. The undo test decides the rest: if the agent can't roll back and blast radius matters, require a second key held by a human. And identity must be stamped by a proxy, not claimed by the caller, or the agent changes its header and every limit resets.
