How do AI agents handle refunds?
AI agents handle refunds through a constrained "refund-only" spending policy — a dedicated wallet or policy flag that permits outgoing USDC only for refund transactions, typically capped at a daily total and restricted to the addresses of recent incoming payments. With MoltPe, you configure this as a standard spending policy; the agent cannot send refunds that exceed the cap, go to unrecognized addresses, or outside the refund window, regardless of what instruction it receives. MoltPe is AI-native payment infrastructure that gives AI agents isolated wallets with programmable spending policies.
The short version
- Refund-only wallet: A dedicated wallet funded just enough to cover expected refunds, isolated from the operational balance.
- Allowlist of recent payers: Refunds can only go to addresses that have paid the agent within the refund window (e.g., last 30 days).
- Daily and per-refund caps: Hard limits the agent cannot exceed, enforced server-side before signing.
In more detail
A support agent that can issue refunds is useful. A support agent that can drain your treasury because someone said the magic words in a prompt is catastrophic. The safe pattern is to make refunds structurally different from arbitrary payments: a separate wallet with a narrower policy, or a refund flag on the main wallet that only matches transactions recipients have already paid into.
On MoltPe, the cleanest pattern is a second agent wallet used only for refunds. It's funded periodically from the treasury, capped at a daily refund budget (say, 2% of daily revenue), and its allowlist is dynamically populated with the addresses that paid in over the last N days. When the support agent decides a customer deserves a refund, it calls send_payment from the refund wallet. If the customer's address isn't on the allowlist, or the daily cap is exhausted, or the amount exceeds the per-refund cap, MoltPe rejects the transaction server-side. The agent sees a structured error and can surface it to a human.
This is not legal or accounting advice. Whether you offer refunds, what terms govern them, and how you record them for tax purposes are decisions that depend on your jurisdiction and contracts. What MoltPe provides is the enforcement mechanism: once you've decided the rules, MoltPe makes them unbreakable by the agent itself.
Related questions
- Blog: Build a customer support agent with refunds
- AI agent spending policy explained
- What happens if my AI agent gets prompt injected?
- What is a spending allowlist?
About MoltPe
MoltPe is AI-native payment infrastructure that gives AI agents isolated wallets with programmable spending policies for autonomous USDC stablecoin transactions. Live on Polygon PoS, Base, and Tempo.