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. 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)

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.

Upvoted.

Not illegal, but it should make enforcing payment illegal.

Sure, after 6 years in court you may get a settlement, 95% of which will go towards paying your legal fees.

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

How dare you question a corporation's ability to make unlimited money?