Agent spend

Give each AI agent a mandate, have it ask Veqen before it spends, and match every card authorization and payment on Stripe Issuing, Ramp, Brex and Mercury to what the agent said it was doing, with approvals, incidents, card freeze, evidence and a monthly controls report.

Agent spend is in beta. It watches AI agents that hold cards or pay from your accounts. Each agent asks Veqen before it spends, or tells Veqen afterwards, and Veqen matches every authorization and payment on the platforms you connect to that record, judged against the agent's mandate. Asking before spending, recording what agents did and the free audit work on every plan; continuous matching, incidents, card freeze, evidence and the monthly report come with any paid plan, at no extra charge while it's in beta, for up to $100,000 of agent spend a month.

Veqen never moves or holds money. It reads with a read-only credential, and freezing a card or setting its limit uses a separate credential you add for that alone.

Connect a platform

Under Settings › Cards and accounts, or PUT /v1/agent-spend/platforms/{platform}, or the card_platforms MCP tool:

A Ramp fund counts as one card, because agent cards spend from a fund and Ramp suspends the fund. Veqen reads Mercury without changing anything there while agent spend is in beta, so a Mercury card is frozen in Mercury. Veqen reads each platform every five minutes, going back six hours each time and three days on the day's first read, so pending charges settle. The first read covers the last 30 days: Veqen judges that history and shows it, but opens no incident for anything from before the platform was connected.

Say which cards are agents'

Only an agent's cards are matched; a person's card is left alone. Veqen reads the agent from a card's metadata (veqen_agent or agent), from its name (agent: procurement-bot), or from Mercury's agent card flag. Assign the rest under Agent spend › Cards, with PATCH /v1/agent-spend/cards/{id} or the agent_cards tool, using - for a person's card. For a Mercury account set aside for agents, name the agent on the connection and every payment from it is that agent's.

Set a mandate

Each agent can have its own mandate, and the agent named * sets the default every other agent follows:

• Refuse one action above (per_action_usd): the check answers deny.
• A person approves one action above (approval_over_usd) and past the monthly limit (monthly_usd): the check answers approval.
• Payees it may pay on its own (merchants): anything else waits for a person. Payees it may never pay (blocked) are refused.
• Paused refuses everything, and freeze its cards by themselves freezes the card when an incident needs action, where freeze access is set up.

PUT /v1/agent-spend/agents/{agent}/policy, or the set_agent_policy tool, changes it. Only the fields you send change, and a limit of 0 or null removes it. Owners, admins and finance members set mandates and answer approvals; turning automatic freezing on or off also takes the protection role (owners, admins and security members), because it acts at the platform.

Ask before spending

import veqen

decision = veqen.check_spend("procurement-bot", 120.00, payee="Acme Supplies", purpose="Laptop stand for OPS-412")
if decision.allowed:
    pay()

import { checkSpend } from "@veqen/sdk";

const decision = await checkSpend({ agent: "procurement-bot", amount: 120, payee: "Acme Supplies", purpose: "Laptop stand" });
if (decision.allowed) await pay();

The answer is allow, approval or deny, with the reasons and what the agent has left this month. With approval, the people who approve hear about it, and the agent asks again with the same action_id (or reads GET /v1/agent-actions/{action_id}) to see their answer; a request nobody answers lapses in a day. An agent has at most 20 requests waiting for a person: past that the answer is deny, and only its first waiting request sends an alert. A send-only key reads and cancels only the actions it sent. When the SDK can't reach Veqen, or has no API key, the answer is on_error, which is deny unless you choose allow. A send-only key is enough: POST /v1/agent-actions/check. Over MCP, check_agent_spend does the same for owners, admins and members, the roles that may make keys.

If the agent decides not to go ahead, POST /v1/agent-actions/{action_id}/cancel stops it counting toward the month. To tell Veqen afterwards instead of asking first, use veqen.record_action(...), recordAction(...), POST /v1/agent-actions (up to 1,000 at a time) or record_agent_actions.

What Veqen flags

Each transaction on an agent's card is matched to one of the agent's actions: from within a week before it (and a day after, for posting dates), within 10% or a dollar of the amount, recorded before Veqen first saw the transaction (or within ten minutes after), on a rail that fits, and naming the payee. A payee matches a merchant when every word of one, three letters or more, is in the other, so "Acme Supplies" matches "ACME SUPPLIES INC" and "Ramp" doesn't match "Trampoline". An action without a payee matches only when it names the card. Then the mandate is checked:

A card's findings close together in time group into one incident on the Incidents list, which alerts owners, admins and security members within minutes and can freeze the card from the alert. "This was us" keeps the card quiet for a week, except for spend Veqen told the agent not to make, spend nobody approved, a paused agent, a blocked payee or a dormant card. An action the agent says it took that no platform showed after three days is marked unseen, and it can still match when the transaction arrives late.

Freeze, evidence and disputes

Freeze a card from its incident, from Agent spend › Cards, with POST /v1/agent-spend/cards/{id}/freeze, or with the agent_cards tool. With two-person shut-off on, a freeze waits for a second owner, admin or security member, for a day. A freeze the mandate asks for is tried up to three times, an hour apart, and each answer from the platform is on the incident's timeline. The incident's evidence (GET /v1/incidents/{id}/evidence, or .csv) sets each charge against the action the agent recorded and any approval, with the mandate in force, for a dispute or an auditor. Record the dispute on the incident and what came back when it's settled.

The monthly report

Agent spend › Report, GET /v1/agent-spend/report/{YYYY-MM} (or .csv), or agent_spend_view with view: report shows each agent's spend, how much an action explained, declines, approvals, incidents, freezes and what came back, with the mandate in force. Card platforms post the purchases to your books themselves, so Veqen doesn't book them again; the report is the evidence of how the spend was controlled. It takes the month-end permission.

Everything else over the API and MCP