Price · 12 Aug 2026 · Illustrative confidence
An agent can burn 100× the tokens of a chat turn
A chat turn is hundreds to a couple of thousand tokens. A complex agent session can run 50,000–200,000. Multi-agent jobs go past a million.
Download PNG/c/agent-tokens
How to read this
Illustrative ranges from practitioner guides — not a single official meter. Gartner’s published theme is 5–30× a standard query (coding agents up to 100×). Stanford/Brynjolfsson (arXiv:2604.22750) found ~1,000× tokens on agentic coding vs code-chat (SWE-bench).
Sources
Practitioner ranges · Gartner (theme) · Stanford Digital Economy Lab 2026