For AI-native teams
Agents that pay for what they use. A fence around each one. A receipt for every dollar.
Lantern Automation builds and runs agents for its clients, six people and three machines.
Agents that pay, inside a fence a person set
A daily ceiling, allowed payees, a wallet whose balance is the worst case, and every proposal shown before the press.
Agents in depth →The research agent paid Serper and Firecrawl overnight and the runner wants to pay Modal. Whose money was it, how much, and who decided?
0.4 USDC
26 USDC
A fence per agent: a daily ceiling, a term, the x402 hosts it may pay, the merchants its card accepts; its own wallet and card, so the worst case is the deposit it was given.
Ads and hosting
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FrozenOrlaVirtual
4512 •••• •••• 2093
HolderElif KayaExpires09/29
VISACards for agents, fenced by merchant: the card pays the merchants you named and declines the rest, with a ceiling per payment and per day.
Clients, treasury and the month around them
Clients invoiced by contract, a treasury on both rails, and rules the team signs by.
Invoices and quotes in depth →Cedar Health pays by transfer, Bluefin pays a milestone in USDC, Orrin paid on the day. Who still owes what, and into which account does it land?
One total, every rail
$131,3144 accounts · updated 09:12Wallets on EVM chains by address beside the bank by feed; balances and their history per account, each one priced at the day's rate, for a quarter or a year at a time, on one screen.
The authority map · who can move money, and what holds them
Elif KayaOwner2 of 4 rule
Noah ReedFinanceSigner
ops-runnerAgentWatch mode
Roles: owner, admin, member, viewer, accountant. An agent's rights come from its own grant and its preset, never from the seat of the person who happens to own it.
Ready to close · 4 of 6
- ✓Every row has a categorydone
- ✓Every category and account has a codedone
- ✓No payment waits for a quorumdone
- ○Every expense has a receiptwon't block closing2 expenses without a receipt
- ✓Bills of the month are paiddone
- ○Invoices of the month are paid1 invoice unpaid
A closing checklist with a door into each list: rows without a category, without an account code, without paper, unpaid invoices, payments still waiting for a signature.
The assistant
Ask it what the agents did this week.
The composer reads the receipts the agents left and tells you what ran on rules and what still waits for a person.
The assistant in full →- Reading the week's rows
- Counting rules against hands
81% by rules. You sorted Modal and Firecrawl by hand every week, so both are worth a rule of their own.
What it takes on
- How much runs on rules
- Which rows the rules sorted this week and which you sorted by hand, and the five merchants worth a rule.
- A brief before you sign
- For a payment on your signature: who they are, what you paid them before, their risk, and how far this amount is from usual.
- A threshold on the forecast
- The USD account goes under 5,000 on the 23rd, said a week before rather than the morning after.
Who does what
Six people, three machines, and one book.
- Founder
- Owns the agents, sets each fence, and signs what crosses the threshold.
- Finance lead
- Reads the receipts, tops up the card pool, prepares the contractor batch, and closes the month.
- Team member
- Runs an agent in observation until its proposals look right, then switches it to active.
- Accountant
- Gets the month as files with every machine's row in it, and a read-only door into the closed period.
Connections
Connected the way an agent team already runs.
Agents come in over MCP with a key each and a grant per space; wallets by address, the bank by feed, and the machines' rows inside the month.
- Claude
- Cursor
- ChatGPT
- AI agents
- Base
- Ethereum
- WalletConnect
- Mercury
Control and trust
What a team needs to trust a machine with money.
- Watch mode
- A new agent proposes and never signs. A person accepts each proposal until the team switches it to active, and not before.
- The fence
- A daily ceiling, a term, the hosts and merchants it may pay; the deposit in its wallet is the worst case.
- Receipts
- Every dollar a machine moved names the agent, whose money it was, and who decided.
- Freeze
- Freeze an agent and even its reads refuse; its card freezes with it, and every right it holds is recomputed on each call it makes.
Questions
The questions that come first.
Does an agent ever hold our private key?
No. An agent that pays on chain has its own wallet with its own key, funded from the treasury with what you decide to deposit; the treasury's key stays where it was. The worst case is the deposit, never the treasury it was funded from.
What stops an agent from paying the wrong host or merchant?
Its fence. A rule names the x402 hosts it may pay and the merchants its card accepts, with a ceiling per payment and per day; anything outside is declined and the refusal is written down. A rule for one space never applies in another.
Can the accountant tell a machine's row from a person's?
Yes. Every row an agent booked or paid carries the agent's name and its receipt: which agent, whose money, how much, to whom, and who decided. It goes out with the month's files like any other row, with its receipt attached.
See it on your own books.
Thirty minutes: we connect an account, drop a real bill in, and close a month together.