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I built a hitman for rogue agents: dead man's switch and spend controls

I built a hitman for rogue agents: dead man's switch and spend controls

by JackDavis720·Feb 25, 2026·1 point·0 comments
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AI Analysis

●●●BangerBig BrainZero to OneSolve My Problem

Dead man's switch plus spend controls solve a real AI agent safety gap nobody else addresses.

Strengths
  • •Identifies a genuine pain point in deployed AI agents: no remote kill or spend oversight existed.
  • •Dead man's switch + spend limits + audit trail is a thoughtfully layered control design.
  • •Freemium model (self-host free, pay per transaction) removes friction for adoption.
Weaknesses
  • •Early-stage implementation; no evidence of production use or edge cases with actual rogue agents.
  • •Requires agents to support HTTP calls; doesn't work with all agent frameworks or reasoning loops.
Category
AI/ML
Target Audience

AI agent developers, teams deploying autonomous systems

Similar To

Anthropic's audit/control layers · OpenAI's spending limits

Post Description

I've been building autonomous AI agents and kept running into the same problem: once an agent is deployed, you have no good way to control what it spends, detect when it goes rogue, or kill it remotely.

So I built AgentWallet — a lightweight governance layer you can wrap around any agent that can make HTTP calls.

Core features: - Dead Man's Switch: agent must ping a heartbeat endpoint on an interval. Miss it and it auto-terminates. - Spend controls: set per-transaction and daily limits. Transactions above threshold get blocked or flagged for approval. - Kill switch: one API call terminates all agents instantly. - Audit log: full transaction history per agent. - Cross-agent governance: rules cascade to child agents.

It's open source and free to self-host. It charges per transaction (like Stripe but for agent spending).

npm install @jackd720/agentwallet

Live demo (interactive): agentwallet-v2-sdk.vercel.app GitHub: github.com/JackD720/agentwallet

Happy to answer questions about the architecture or design decisions.

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