What Happens When Your AI Agent Crashes Mid-Payment?

When an AI agent crashes mid-task, you have a debugging problem. When it crashes mid-payment, you have a financial problem. These are very different things, and most payment infrastructure wasn't built with the second one in mind. The Scenario No One Plans For Here's a real failure mode we kept hitting while building Rosud: An AI agent receives a task. It starts executing. Partway through, it calls a payment API to settle a micro-transaction with an external service. The call goes out. Then the agent crashes, gets killed by a timeout, or loses its execution context. The payment may have gone through. Or it may not have. The agent doesn't know. Neither does your system. What happens next? If you retry, you might double-charge. If you don't retry, you might leave a task unfinished. Both are bad. In a traditional human-in-the-loop flow, someone would just check. AI agents don't have that option. Why Idempotency Isn't Enough The standard answer is "use idempotency keys." And yes, that help