AI engineering glossary · Evals guardrails AI security
What is denial of wallet?
Denial of wallet: An attack that aims to drain a victim's budget rather than take the service offline, by driving up pay-per-use costs such as tokens or GPU time. It is a concern for metered language model APIs, and is countered with spending caps and usage alerts.
Denial of wallet: an example
A bot farm sends long requests to a public chatbot until the company's monthly token budget is exhausted in two days.
Related terms
More Evals guardrails AI security terms
- Direct prompt injection
- Egress filtering
- Elo rating
- Encoding attack
- Eval set
- Evaluation harness
- Evasion attack
- Excessive agency
Where you learn it
Denial of wallet is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.