Metadata
- Author: anthropic.com
- Full Title:: How We Built Our Multi-Agent Research System
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- URL:: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/built-multi-agent-research-system
- Read date:: 2025-06-23
Highlights
The essence of search is compression: distilling insights from a vast corpus. Subagents facilitate compression by operating in parallel with their own context windows, exploring different aspects of the question simultaneously before condensing the most important tokens for the lead research agent. (View Highlight)
Our internal evaluations show that multi-agent research systems excel especially for breadth-first queries that involve pursuing multiple independent directions simultaneously. We found that a multi-agent system with Claude Opus 4 as the lead agent and Claude Sonnet 4 subagents outperformed single-agent Claude Opus 4 by 90.2% on our internal research eval. (View Highlight)
There is a downside: in practice, these architectures burn through tokens fast. In our data, agents typically use about 4× more tokens than chat interactions, and multi-agent systems use about 15× more tokens than chats. (View Highlight)