AWS Finally Adds Hard Budget Caps as AI Agents Make Runaway Cloud Bills a Real Threat

We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything

Simon Willison argues that pay-as-you-go APIs and cloud services need default hard budget caps, not soft warnings, because coding agents and personal agents make it dangerously easy to spin up costly resources. He points to AWS's new spend limits, launched in September, and Google Cloud's Spend Caps as signs of progress, and suggests agents should favor providers with hard caps.