Agent Commerce · Core Concept
AI spend governance
Controlling how AI agents use money
As AI agents gain the ability to spend, governance becomes essential. AI spend governance defines how spending is controlled, monitored, and enforced across systems.
What is AI spend governance?
AI spend governance is the set of policies, controls, and audit mechanisms that manage how agents spend money. It includes spending limits, approval workflows, policy enforcement, audit trails, and monitoring. It ensures agent-driven payments remain safe, predictable, and compliant.
Why governance is required
AI agents operate differently than humans — they act automatically, can scale quickly, and execute decisions without manual review. Without governance this leads to uncontrolled spend, compliance risk, and lack of visibility.
Governance introduces structure and oversight without removing automation.
Governance vs authorization
Governance
Manages the full lifecycle — rules, approvals, logging, review, and evolution.
Governance components in Agent Commerce
Policy enforcement
Every payment request is evaluated against a policy rule set before execution. No payment runs without a policy pass.
Spend limits
Per-transaction and daily limits cap what agents can spend. Limits are evaluated at execution time, not after.
Approval workflows
High-value or unusual requests are escalated to human review before execution — not flagged after the fact.
Decision lineage
Every authorization decision is written as a lineage record: actor, policy version, decision, reason codes, and timestamp.
Signed receipts
Every executed payment produces an Ed25519-signed receipt — a permanent, independently verifiable record.
Audit trail
The full payment lifecycle — from request through authorization through receipt — is available for governance review.