For AI-native teams
Agents that pay for what they use, with a receipt for every dollar
Lantern Automation builds and runs agents for its clients, six people and three machines.
Agents that pay, inside a fence a person set
A daily cap that waits for you, a spend guard that stops, a card whose balance is its whole limit, and a trail of every refusal at the perimeter.
Agents in depth →The research agent paid Serper and Firecrawl overnight and the runner wants to pay Modal. Whose money was it, how much, and who decided?
1.20 USDC
0.12 USDC
62.40 USDC
A term, the hosts it may pay, a daily cap on its wallet, and a monthly spend guard that freezes the agent where other rules only tell.
Infra
•••• 4471
FrozenOrlaVirtual
4512 •••• •••• 5520
Tools agenttools-agentExpires09/29
Cards for agents, fenced by balance: the card holds exactly what you moved onto it from the pool, so a wrong charge can take at most that. Start it from a supplier limit and the balance is the limit.
Clients, treasury and the month
Clients invoiced by contract, a treasury on both rails with the vendors' own usage figures beside it, and rules the team signs by.
Invoices and quotes in depth →Cedar Health pays by transfer, Bluefin pays a milestone in USDC, Orrin paid on the day. Who still owes what, and into which account does it land?
One total, every rail
$298,0003 accounts · updated 09:12Wallets beside the bank, and what the machines used at OpenAI and Anthropic read from the vendor's own report, not guessed from the card.
The authority map · who can move money, and what holds them
Elif KayaOwner2 of 5 rule
Marcus LindFinanceSigner
research-agentAgentWatch mode
Roles: owner, admin, member, viewer, accountant. An agent's rights come from its own grant and its preset, never from the seat of the person who happens to own it.
Ready to close · 4 of 6
- ✓Every row has a categorydone
- ✓Every category and account has a codedone
- ✓No payment waits for a quorumdone
- ○Every expense has a receiptwon't block closing3 expenses without a receipt
- ✓Bills of the month are paiddone
- ○Invoices of the month are paid1 invoice unpaid · Bluefin Retail
A closing checklist with a door into each list: rows without a category, without an account code, without paper, unpaid invoices, payments still waiting for a signature.
The assistant
Ask it what the agents did this week
The composer reads the receipts the agents left and tells you what ran on rules and what still waits for a person.
The assistant in full →- Reading the week's rows
- Counting rules against hands
81% by rules. You sorted Modal and Firecrawl by hand every week, so both are worth a rule of their own.
What it takes on
- How much runs on rules
- Which rows the rules sorted this week and which you sorted by hand, and the five merchants worth a rule.
- A brief before you sign
- For a payment on your signature: who they are, what you paid them before, their risk, and how far this amount is from usual.
- A threshold on the forecast
- USD Main runs below 5,000 on the 23rd, said a week before rather than the morning after.
Connections
Agents sign in over MCP, or use a key
Agents sign in over MCP, or use a revocable key for a script or an n8n flow, each under a grant per space. Wallets by address, the bank by feed.
- Claude
- Cursor
- ChatGPT
- AI agents
- n8n
- Base
- Ethereum
- Mercury
Who does what
Six people, three machines, different rights
- Founder
- Owns the agents, sets each fence and its spend guard, unfreezes what the guard stopped, and signs what crosses the threshold.
- Finance lead
- Reads the receipts and the vendors' own usage figures, tops up the card pool, prepares the contractor batch, and closes the month.
- Team member
- Runs an agent in observation until its proposals look right, then switches it to active.
- Accountant
- Finds every machine's row in the month's files, and reads the closed period as it was closed.
Control and trust
Before a machine spends a dollar
- Watch mode
- A new agent spends nothing on its own and only proposes. A person accepts each proposal until the team switches it to active, and not before.
- The fence
- A term, the hosts it may pay, a daily cap on its wallet and a monthly spend guard that freezes it. On a card the balance is the whole limit, and the deposit is the worst case.
- Receipts
- Every dollar a machine moved names the agent, whose money it was, and who decided.
- Freeze
- Freeze an agent and even its reads refuse; its card freezes with it, and every right it holds is recomputed on each call it makes.
Questions
The questions that come first
Does an agent ever hold our private key?
No. An agent that pays on chain has its own wallet, and its key is made inside a managed key service and never lands on Orla's servers: they only ask it for a signature the fence already allowed. It is funded from the treasury with what you decide to deposit; the treasury's key stays where it was. The worst case is the deposit, never the treasury it was funded from.
What stops an agent from paying the wrong host or merchant?
Its fence. The x402 hosts it may pay are a list a person keeps, with a ceiling per request and per day, and the address a host is paid at is pinned by the first payment, so a changed address waits for the owner. A new agent card has no merchant rules to lean on: it holds only what you moved onto it, so a wrong merchant gets at most the card's balance. A refusal at the perimeter is written to the trail, and a rule for one space never applies in another.
Can a ceiling stop an agent, or does it only tell us?
The spend guard stops. It is a monthly ceiling in USD on one agent or on one supplier: over it the agent is frozen together with its card, and the approvers are told with the month's figures. Only a person unfreezes, and what was unfrozen keeps working until next month.
Does the agent ever see the card number?
Not by default. You can allow the numbers, once, on the card's policy: the agent reads the number, expiry and CVV one time and may ask again only after you save that form again. What it took cannot be taken back except by blocking the card, so keep on that card only what this agent may spend.
Can the accountant tell a machine's row from a person's?
Yes. Every row an agent booked or paid carries the agent's name and its receipt: which agent, whose money, how much, to whom, and who decided. It goes out with the month's files like any other row, with its receipt attached.
See it on your own books
Thirty minutes: we connect an account, drop a real bill in, and close a month together.