AI Agent Cost Attribution: How to Know Which Agent Is Burning Your Budget

AI Agent Cost Attribution: How to Know Which Agent Is Burning Your Budget The CFO calls. Your AI infrastructure bill doubled last month. Which agent did it? If you cannot answer that in 30 seconds, you have a cost attribution problem. Why AI Agent Cost Is Hard to Track Shared model endpoints. Multiple agents hit the same OpenAI or Anthropic API. The bill is one line item. Which agent made which call? Cascading tool use. An agent calls a tool, which triggers another API call, which generates another LLM call. Cost cascades across systems with no parent reference. Runaway behaviour. An agent in a loop hitting an API 10,000 times in an hour will not be obvious in aggregate dashboards until the invoice arrives. The Right Architecture Every agent action needs to carry identity metadata: { "agentId" : "customer-support-v2" , "teamId" : "customer-ops" , "costCentre" : "CC-2041" , "tool" : "openai_completion" , "model" : "gpt-4o" , "tokensIn" : 1240 , "tokensOut" : 89 , "estimatedCost" : 0.004