Comment by qudent

3 days ago

In Google AI Studio, Google documentation encourages to deploy vibecoded apps with an open proxy that allow equivalent AI billing abuse - giving the impression that the API key were secure because it is behind a proxy. Even an app with 0 AI features exposes dollars-per-query video models unless the key is manually scoped. Vulnerable apps (all apps deployed from AI Studio) are easily found by searching Google, Twitter or Hacker News. https://github.com/qudent/qudent.github.io/blob/master/_post...

52 comments

qudent

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gib444  3 days ago

[flagged]

  • qudent  3 days ago

    I think the fact that it is not possible to put hard spending caps on API keys might be ruled illegal by some EU court soon enough, at least when they sell to consumers (given the explosion of vibecoding end-users making some apps). When I use OpenAI, Openrouter etc., I can put 10 $ on my API key, and when the key leaks, someone can use these 10 $ and that's it. With Google, there is no way to do that - there are extremely complicated "billing alerts" https://firebase.google.com/docs/projects/billing/advanced-b... , but these are time-delayed e-mails and there is no out of the box way to do the straightforward thing, which is to actually turn off the tap automatically once a budget is spent. The only native way to set a limit enforced immediately is by rate limiting - but I didn't see params which made it safe while usable in my case.

    (a legal angle might be the Unfair Contract Terms Directive in the EU, though plenty of individual countries have their own laws that may apply to my understanding. A quite equivalent situation were the "bill shock" situations for mobile phone users, where people went on vacation and arrived home to an outrageously high roaming bill that they didn't understand they incurred. This is also limited today in the EU; by law, the service must be stopped after a certain charge is incurred)

    • falcor84  3 days ago

      > When I use OpenAI, Openrouter etc., I can put 10 $ on my API key, and when the key leaks, someone can use these 10 $ and that's it.

      On that note, I'll just mention that I had discovered over the last while that when you prepay $10 into your Anthropic account, either directly, or via the newer "Extra usage" in subscription plans, and then use Claude Code, they will repeatedly overbill you, putting you into a negative balance. I actually complained and they told me that they allow the "final query" to complete rather than cutting it off mid-process, which is of course silly, because Claude Code is typically used for long sessions, where the benefit of being cut off 52% into the task rather than 51% into it is essentially meaningless.

      I ended up paying for these so far, but would hope that someone with more free time sues them on it.

      6 replies →

    • carshodev  3 days ago

      I don't know if its still like this but around 1 year ago I set a spending limit for an OpenAI api key but it turns out its not a true limit. I spent 80$ on a 20$ limited key in the matter of minutes due to some bad code I wrote causing a looped loop.

      I still had to pay it or else I wouldn't have been able to use my account.

      3 replies →

    • Nathanba  3 days ago

      let's hope it happens soon, I'm pretty sick of this reality where companies get to charge you whatever they want and it's designed to always be your fault

      16 replies →

  • dathinab  3 days ago

    I think the term you are looking for is "negligence".

    But not in the causal sense of the word but in the legal "the company didn't folly the legal required base line of acting with due diligence".

    In general companies are required to act with diligence, this is also e.g. where punitive damages come in to produce a insensitive to companies to act with diligence or they might need to pay far above the actual damages done.

    This is also why in some countries for negligence the executives related to the negligent decisions up to the CEO can be hold _personally_ liable. (Through mostly wrt. cases of negligence where people got physically harmed/died; And mostly as an alternative approach to keeping companies diligent, i.e. instead of punitive damages.).

    The main problem is that in many cases companies do wriggle their way out of it with a mixture of "make pretend" diligence, lawyer nonsense dragging thing out and early settlements.

  • gmerc  3 days ago

    Not illegal enough to worry about. nothing a peace board donation can’t fix.

  • Dylan16807  3 days ago

    > Downvoted for asking an honest question.

    If you put in "surely" and people think it's quite wrong then they might downvote. It's not personal.

  • hluska  3 days ago

    It’s possibly civil, but I don’t see how this type of negligence would be breaking a law. If it was illegal, a massive number of independent consultants would be serving prison sentences. I’m not sure how that makes anything better though I guess a lot of people think rage is fun.