AI engineering glossary · Evals guardrails AI security
What is unbounded consumption?
Unbounded consumption (also called model denial of service): An OWASP-listed risk where a system lets users trigger excessive inference, for example huge inputs, endless loops or floods of requests, leading to outages, large bills or model theft. Controls include quotas, rate limits, input size caps and cost monitoring.
Unbounded consumption: an example
An attacker submits thousands of very long prompts to a paid API endpoint, running up an unexpected cloud bill in a weekend.
Related terms
More Evals guardrails AI security terms
- Vector and embedding weaknesses
- Verbosity bias
- Access control
- Adversarial example
- Adversarial robustness
- Adversarial suffix
- Adversarial test set
- Adversarial training
Where you learn it
Unbounded consumption is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.