Multi-agent AI fails between 41% and 87% of the time across state-of-the-art open-source frameworks.
That is not a fringe finding. It is the headline result of a study that annotated 1,642 real execution traces across seven frameworks, published at NeurIPS 2025.
Before building a multi-agent system, it is worth asking whether you need one.
The four-rung ladder
Think about this as a ladder of increasing autonomy. Each rung adds capability. Each rung adds cost and failure surface in equal measure.
