The AI agent refund safety checklist

Six of the twelve

• 01The agent never holds the payment keyIf it can call Stripe, Paddle or Chargebee itself, every other check is advice.
• 02Every action has a mandateWhich customer, which payments, how much, how many times, until when — set by your backend, not the model.
• 03A retry can’t refund twiceBusiness key, budget reservation, and a provider idempotency key (and what to do when the provider has none).
• 04“Done” only after the provider says soThe reply is checked against what really happened — not against what the agent claimed.
• 05Refunds above a line wait for a personAnd the approver sees the exact amount and payment, not a summary.
• 06Test the lost response, not just the happy pathTimeouts, duplicates, the wrong customer, the wrong currency — before customers find them.