Equation 3 · The Economics and Physical Limits of Running AI Agents at Scale
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The second component is genuinely new content: whatever this step adds that the loop has not seen before — a fresh tool result, a new instruction, an observation from the environment. Call this . The third is the step’s own output, call it , priced at the output rate, which is five times the input rate on every currently supported Claude tier, from Haiku 4.5 through Opus 5, and roughly six times on OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 family [ 1 , 7 ] .
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