Autonomous Spending

The ability of an AI agent to make financial decisions and execute payments without human approval for each transaction.

Autonomous spending is the capability that lets AI agents decide when, what, and how much to pay — without waiting for human approval on each transaction. This is the core value proposition of Mithril: instead of a human pre-approving every API call, the agent operates within predefined spending limits and makes its own purchasing decisions. For example, a research agent might choose to call Exa for a search ($0.003), then Firecrawl to scrape a result ($0.01), then OpenRouter for summarization ($0.05) — all autonomously. The human sets the guardrails; the agent handles the spending.