Give ten agents a shared, metered tool — a paid search or research API where every call is real

money — and you've handed ten of them the same company credit card. Each one reasons "I'll just run

a quick search." You find out the total on the invoice.

Anthropic's own multi-agent write-up clocks a fleet at roughly 15x the tokens of a single chat.

That's the token pool. The paid external tools are the line item the orchestration playbooks skip —