Cost attribution is the practice of mapping spending back to the team, product, task, user, or workflow that caused it. In cloud and AI environments, that usually means attaching request IDs, service names, owners, and labels to each billable action so finance and engineering can see where the money went, not just how much was spent overall.
In cyber security, cost attribution matters because spend can be a signal of misuse or attack. A compromised account, abusive bot, runaway automation, or agent loop may generate unusual API calls, retries, storage growth, or model usage that rapidly increases cost. Good attribution helps defenders spot these patterns early, assign accountability, set budgets and alerts, and distinguish normal heavy use from suspicious activity. It also supports chargeback and showback models, where teams pay for or at least see the cost of their own workloads. Without attribution, malicious or broken processes can hide inside a single monthly invoice.