Practical review guide revised September 17, 2026. The linked published essays retain their original text. For current status and source documents, use the publication record.
Commercial and technical diligence companion
Use the demonstration plan below to evaluate a product or vendor. Inspect substitutions, retries, delegated spending and completion against the task’s declared allowance.
- The Four Token Ledgers: The economic essay develops the four-ledger distinction and the cost-accounting argument.
- Tokens and Authority: The carrier-focused essay examines inference sold as a subscriber entitlement.
Ask a vendor to demonstrate control of the next spending decision. Give an assistant a bounded analysis task, an explicit allowance and a completion condition. Then make its preferred model unavailable, cause a recoverable error and offer it additional work. Watch what the system admits before any new charge is incurred.
The trial needs a declared principal and account. It also needs a way to relate a service call to the work being evaluated. Otherwise a charge can be attributed to a credential without establishing why that credential was used for this task.
Collect four views of the same event
| View | What to inspect | Question for the demonstration |
|---|---|---|
| Compute | The model, processing resource and work consumed. | Can the controller change the proposed resource before execution? |
| Billing | The account and charging event. | How does the charge identify the undertaking that caused it? |
| Entitlement | The service or allowance available under the plan. | What prevents two concurrent requests from relying on the same remaining allowance? |
| Authority | The permission for this requested action. | Which component can refuse spending that exceeds the task’s scope? |
Inspect a decision before the charge
Start with an ordinary successful request. Capture the proposed service, the conditions checked, the approval and the observed charge. Use that trace as a reference when introducing changes. A spending report becomes evidence of control only when it can be connected to the decision that affected execution.
Change the service while preserving the assignment
Offer a more expensive substitute after the preferred model fails. Determine whether the original assignment permits that substitution, who can approve an exception and what information is available before the replacement runs. Do the same for a change in processing location or recipient.
Follow retries and delegates
A retry and a delegated task can create new charges even when the initiating request looks unchanged. Repeat a request with the same event identifier, then issue two requests concurrently. Check how the system distinguishes a duplicate from additional authorized work and how it reserves the remaining allowance.
Next let the agent enlist a second service. Observe whether the delegate receives a spending limit, which account bears its cost and who can stop it. End the original assignment while that service is still active and inspect the consequences for queued work.
Test competing conditions
Construct a case in which the cheapest resource is outside an approved location, or the only available model lacks the necessary permission. Record which condition controls the outcome. Include a service interruption so the demonstration also shows whether a fallback can be selected within the same limits.
Reconcile the result to the work
At completion, collect the accepted actions, refused proposals, consumed allowance and final charges. Attribute each item to the undertaking being reviewed. Investigate any charge that requires an explanation outside that trace, and any action still running after its permission should have ended.
What to take away from the review
Ask for one reproducible success trace, one refusal trace and one closure trace. Identify which behaviors the demonstration established and which depend on configuration or further implementation. These observations support a concrete commercial discussion about where the portfolio’s functions may fit.
Read The Four Token Ledgers for the economic argument. Read Tokens and Authority for the carrier-entitlement argument. This guide supplies the demonstration questions that follow from those essays.
Use this page in a system review
- Can a proposed retry, delegation or model change be attributed to one authorized undertaking before it incurs cost?
- Which control can alter that proposal, and which ledger records the resulting decision?
- What ends the spending authority when the work completes or its scope changes?