Agent Budget Governance

Prevent runaway API spending in multi-agent systems. Each agent gets a daily output token budget. Exceed it and you get warnings. Keep exceeding it and you lose mesh spawn privileges.

How It Works

Agent completes task → tokens logged to BUDGET.json
                          ↓
Heartbeat runs budget_audit.py
                          ↓
├── Under 80%: ✅ Green — business as usual
├── 80-100%: 🟡 Yellow — warning logged
├── 100-200%: 🔴 Red — alert to orchestrator
└── 200%+ or 3 consecutive days over: ⛔ Demotion — mesh privileges revoked

Budget File Format

Each agent has agents/<name>/BUDGET.json:

{
  "daily_limit": 50000,
  "today": "2026-03-01",
  "used_today": 23450,
  "consecutive_over_days": 0,
  "demoted": false
}

Running the Audit

python3 scripts/budget_audit.py          # Full audit with alerts
python3 scripts/budget_audit.py --json   # Machine-readable output
python3 scripts/budget_audit.py --reset-only  # Just reset daily counters

Governance Rules

1. Daily reset at midnight (configurable timezone)
2. Yellow at 80% — logged, no action
3. Red at 100% — logged, orchestrator alerted
4. Demotion at 200% OR 3 consecutive days over budget
5. Rehabilitation — demoted agent must go 7 clean days, then orchestrator manually restores privileges

Demotion Mechanics

Demotion removes an agent's subagents.allowAgents list in openclaw.json, preventing them from spawning other agents. They can still be spawned by the orchestrator.

Files

• scripts/budget_audit.py — Audit script (run from heartbeat or cron)
• references/GOVERNANCE.md — Full governance framework documentation