The Hidden Cost of Multi-Agent AI Systems: Why More Agents Are Not Automatically Better

The current wave of agentic AI has created a strong impression that agents mean intelligence. In practive, the opposite can happen once coordination, state sharing, routing and debugging become part of the system. Anthropic and openai both describes from specialization and decomposition ‘ both also warn the complexity, cost and overhead rise quickly as you add moving parts. Why people build multiple agents in the first place? The appeal is easy to understand.