Introducing the Agent Control Layer
Rain's Agent Control Layer gives businesses and developers precise, programmatic control over how AI agents spend using cards and move money on behalf of users. Partners define the conditions under which an agent can transact, and Rain enforces them before any money moves.
Agents have been transacting on Rain's infrastructure in production for months. They book travel, subscribe to software, run procurement workflows, and move money globally. To scale that activity, businesses need to bound what an agent can do, keep its activity auditable, and adjust the limits as workflows grow. The Agent Control Layer provides that framework.
The controls are enforced at card issuance and transfer initiation rather than applied after the fact. By the time an agent attempts to transact, the governing rules are already in place, and a transaction that falls outside them does not proceed.
Card controls
Rain's scoped virtual card infrastructure already supports agent purchases. The Agent Control Layer adds two levels of control on top of it.
At the agent level, users define what their agent can do before it acts: transaction amounts, merchant and category allowlists, spend intervals, and card expiry. An agent issued a card for a single booking can be limited to approved airlines or hotels, capped at a set amount, and restricted to a defined window. Outside those parameters, the card does not transact.
At the program level, partners manage risk across their entire user base, with caps on the number of active cards, aggregate spend limits, and the visibility to identify unusual activity early.
Sponge, a Y Combinator-backed company building for autonomous agents, is one of the partners issuing agent-usable cards on Rain today. Its cards are funded by a user's stablecoin balance and let agents transact anywhere Visa is accepted online, across more than 175 million merchant locations.
Money movement controls
The same controls extend across Rain's money movement suite: virtual accounts, onramps, offramps, and fiat and stablecoin payments to individuals and businesses. Partners define approved counterparties, amounts, frequency, and timing before an agent is permitted to act.
A business that enables agents to manage vendor payments can restrict those agents to approved vendors, on a defined schedule, for a defined amount. Changes to those terms require explicit action by a human administrator.
Available in beta
The Agent Control Layer is available in beta. Businesses tracking the autonomous payments category now have production-ready infrastructure and a governance framework built for machine actors, and can begin running real workflows rather than waiting for the category to mature.
It is the latest piece of Rain's ongoing work in agentic payments, which spans compliance frameworks built for autonomous actors, programmable settlement across cards, bank rails, and blockchains, and interoperability with emerging agentic commerce protocols, including early work on the open standards we believe the industry will need to build together.
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