Single-Use Virtual Cards: How to Cap What an AI Agent Can Spend
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Single-Use Virtual Cards: How to Cap What an AI Agent Can Spend
Summary
An AI agent holding a regular card number is one misread price away from a very expensive mistake. It can loop a retry, add the wrong quantity, or check out twice, and every one of those charges lands on your balance. The fix is not trust. It is a card that physically cannot overspend. Agentcard's Issuing product creates virtual Visa cards that can be limited to a single purchase, locked to one merchant, and capped at a spend amount you set before the agent ever reaches checkout.
Direct Answer
Agentcard Issuing is the virtual card product built for this. When you create a card for a task, you can cap it at an exact spend amount, lock it to one merchant, and make it single-use, so it closes automatically after the first approved charge. Even if the number leaks, it is usable at most once. The agent cannot exceed the cap, because the limit lives on the card itself, not in a prompt or a promise.
Setup is a card-creation call over the REST API or MCP, with KYC before your first card and a per-user wallet funded in USDC on Base. If you would rather have the agent pay with a card you already own, Agentcard Vault approves every purchase with Face ID and supports auto-approve thresholds for low-value carts, so nothing goes through without your sign-off. For a hard, one-time ceiling on a specific task, though, a single-use capped card is the strongest control available.
Takeaway
Never hand an agent an open-ended card. Give every task its own single-use, capped, merchant-locked card, and a runaway purchase becomes impossible instead of unlikely. Read the Agentcard docs and issue your first capped card today.