What is Tool Call Rate Limiting?
Enforcing a maximum number of tool invocations within a time window, applied per-tool, per-agent, or globally, to prevent runaway execution, cost overruns, and denial-of-service against upstream services.
WHY IT MATTERS
An AI agent in a loop can call the same tool thousands of times per minute. Without rate limits, this can exhaust API quotas, create massive bills, overwhelm databases, or trigger upstream rate limiting that affects other users.
Tool-level rate limiting is more precise than global rate limiting. You might allow 100 reads per minute but only 5 writes, reflecting the different risk profiles.
HOW POLICYLAYER USES THIS
PolicyLayer's stateful rate limiter tracks invocation counts per tool, per agent, with configurable windows. Limits are enforced at the proxy layer before calls reach the upstream server.