Are you paying an AI ‘swarm tax’? Why single agents often beat complex systems

Enterprise teams building multi-agent AI systems may be paying a compute premium for gains that don't hold up under equal-budget conditions. New Stanford University research finds that single-agent systems match or outperform multi-agent architectures on complex reasoning tasks when both are given the same thinking token budget. However, multi-agent systems come with the added baggage of computational overhead. Because they typically use longer reasoning traces and multiple interactions, it