Morning Edition · Tuesday, August 18, 2026Published at 2:24 AM EDT · New York

Paper Finds Agent Retries Inflate the True Cost of a Model Up to 4.25 Times Its Listed Price

InflationAgent measures the gap between per-token pricing and full workflow cost, and routes on a difficulty signal that predicts retries with 0.887 area under the curve.

A preprint posted to arXiv, Not All Tokens Are Equal: Inflation-Aware Routing for Agentic LLM Systems, attacks an assumption built into every model router in production. Routers pick a model by comparing advertised price per token against e…