AINewsnow

AI agent swarms are a massive waste of tokens with zero quality gain, says OpenAI Codex developer

This story is from 2026-09-17. It is preserved in the archive; the latest stories are on the live feed.

OpenAI Codex developer Eric Provencher warns that running more than two parallel sub-agents almost always burns tokens without improving quality because agents don't trust each other and end up double-checking everyone's work. He calls this the "coordination tax" and points to a project where 1,393…

Read the full story at The Decoder ↗

Timeline · 1 report

  1. 2026-09-17 11:03 · The Decoder
    AI agent swarms are a massive waste of tokens with zero quality gain, says OpenAI Codex developer

More stories

  1. Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, Google sued over call to ‘pace’ AI development — Politico Technology
  2. Google's Gemini AI hacks three other companies during security test — Sky News Technology
  3. Gemini Hacked Three Companies in First Known Breakout by Google’s AI — Wall Street Journal Technology
  4. Microsoft exec called AI scraping the “largest theft of labor in human history” — Ars Technica AI
  5. Meet the Data Agent in ChatGPT Work — OpenAI YouTube
  6. Introducing the Australian Youth Safety Blueprint — OpenAI News
  7. OpenAI and Microsoft knew they were starting a ‘doom loop’ for the web — The Verge AI
  8. Anthropic mulls new AI model ahead of IPO to counter OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, says report: What we know — Mint AI

Get the daily brief of stories like this at 6:30 every morning →