Give the Agent a Budget, Not a Token — Sachin Malhotra, Anthropic
Source
AI Engineer
Author
AI Engineer
Date
Terms in this piece · Glossary
AI agent — An AI system that doesn't just answer once but works toward a goal in a loop — taking actions, reading the results, and deciding what to do next.
token — The chunk of text a model reads and writes in — roughly three-quarters of a word — and the unit AI usage is billed in.
Why it matters
Scoped tokenThe chunk of text a model reads and writes in — roughly three-quarters of a word — and the unit AI usage is billed in.Full definition → are booleans and don't bound blast radius. Budgeting AI agentAn AI system that doesn't just answer once but works toward a goal in a loop — taking actions, reading the results, and deciding what to do next.Full definition → authority along magnitude, rate, reversibility and visibility is a design you can apply to any agent that holds write access.
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