Your AI Agent Will Double-Charge on a Lost Response

Short summary

AI agents' naive retry logic causes double-charges when tool responses are lost. The agent sees no result, so it retries the same action—unaware the first side effect already fired. The fix depends on ownership: idempotency ledgers for internal effects you control, or provider-side keys (like Stripe's) for external charges. Backoff and retry ceilings address network reliability, not semantic safety.

• •Lost responses cause agents to retry side effects already executed, doubling charges
• •At-most-once delivery requires idempotency at the correct boundary: client-side for owned systems, provider-side for external APIs
• •Network patterns (backoff, retry ceilings) solve availability, not idempotency—semantic dedup is required

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.