The Harness Effect: How Orchestration Design Sets the Token Economics of Enterprise Agentic AI
Agentic AI development today runs on token maxing: buying capability with tokens -- longer reasoning traces, more turns, wider tool payloads, bigger replayed contexts -- so tokens per task grow faster than task value. Falling per-token prices mask the pattern; total spend rises anyway. We argue the decisive lever against token maxing is the harness: the orchestration layer that assembles context, exposes tools, sequences turns, delegates work, and carries enterprise observability and governance.
Record details
Published: 8 July 2026
Source: arXiv
Category: Research
Topics: Regulation · Agents & autonomy
Retrieved: 14 July 2026
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ethics.ai (8 July 2026), “The Harness Effect: How Orchestration Design Sets the Token Economics of Enterprise Agentic AI,” evidence record 139, https://ethics.ai/record/139 (originally published by arXiv).
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