If you run agents on SohoPay, you are the liable party for what they spend. This page spells out that responsibility in plain terms, gives you a step-by-step runbook for a compromised agent, and lists what SohoPay does and does not cover. It is written for operators, their finance teams, and their counsel.

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The operator is the liable party

An AI agent cannot sign a contract or be sued. The operator — the entity that creates the agent, funds its vault collateral, and sets its limits — is legally responsible for every transaction the agent authorizes, including:
  • Purchases the agent made correctly but you didn’t intend
  • Purchases made by a compromised agent, up to its credit and daily limits
  • The 5% fee on all of the above (see Fee Structure)
Your practical exposure is bounded by the limits you set: an agent can never spend beyond its credit_limit, its daily_limit, or outside the on-chain merchant allowlist. Size these to the maximum loss you can absorb, not the maximum spend you can imagine.

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The operator_acknowledgment flag

Every agent creation call must include operator_acknowledgment: true. The API rejects the request without it. The flag records, per agent, that you accepted liability for that agent’s transactions at creation time:
Setting operator_acknowledgment: true is a legal act, not a boilerplate field. It binds your organization to the liability terms in the SohoPay Terms of Service for that agent. Don’t hardcode it into a script that people run without understanding it.
The acknowledgment exists in two places, and both are required:

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If an agent is compromised

Agent keys are generated and held inside SohoPay’s MPC infrastructure — you never hold raw private keys, so “compromise” usually means a leaked API key or hijacked agent logic, not key theft. Either way, the response is the same:
1

Detect via anomaly alerts

Watch for the signals: payments to unfamiliar (but allowlisted) merchants, spend velocity jumping toward the daily limit, off-hours activity, or a burst of RATE_LIMITED errors. Configure alerts in Wallet Usage Analytics — 80% daily-limit utilization is the alert most operators catch compromises with — and watch live activity in the Live Feed.
2

Pause the agent immediately

Freeze the credit line by pausing the agent. Paused agents fail every Policy Service check, so no further settlements can occur:
Rotate the API key that manages the agent at the same time (Settings → API Keys in the Dashboard) — a paused agent with a leaked key can be un-paused by the attacker.
3

File a claim with evidence

Email support@sohopay.xyz with subject line “SECURITY: agent compromise” (this routes to the critical, under-1-hour queue). Include:
  • The agent ID and the time window of suspicious activity
  • Your application logs showing what the agent was instructed to do vs. what it did
  • Payment IDs and settlement transaction hashes for the disputed transactions
  • Webhook delivery records (payment.created, payment.settled events) if you keep them
4

Dispute timeline

SohoPay acknowledges critical claims in under 1 hour, correlates your evidence against Policy Service logs and the on-chain record, and targets an initial determination within 5 business days. Contested outcomes follow the claims process in the Terms of Service — see the overview on Settlement & Trust Model.

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What SohoPay covers — and what it doesn’t

In short: SohoPay covers failures of its enforcement guarantees; you cover failures of your own systems and agent behavior. The trust boundary table on Settlement & Trust Model shows exactly which guarantee sits where.

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Insurance

For meaningful credit lines, most operators should carry:
  • Cyber liability insurance — covers losses from compromised systems, including leaked credentials that lead to unauthorized agent spend.
  • Commercial crime insurance — covers theft of funds, including social-engineering and computer-fraud riders that can extend to agent-initiated transfers.
When applying, insurers will ask about controls. Being able to point to hard per-agent limits, on-chain allowlisting, 2-of-3 MPC signing, and a documented pause-and-claim runbook materially improves your position. This page is written to double as that documentation.
SohoPay does not currently offer or resell insurance products. Confirm with your broker that agent-initiated transactions fall within your policy’s definition of covered acts.

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Next steps

Trust Model

The full picture of who pays, who’s paid, and what’s enforced where.

Rate Limits

Use daily and hourly limits as your primary loss-bounding control.

Wallet Usage Analytics

Set the anomaly alerts this runbook depends on.