Give the Agent a Budget, Not a Token — Sachin Malhotra, Anthropic
Anthropic's CI team lost 200 workloads in 90 seconds because giving agents a token and tool list isn't enough
“this idea of like here's a token and here's a tool list that is just like not enough like it just doesn't scale when the agent is starting to do some some like real work in production.”
A Sachin Malhotra, an engineer on Anthropic's internal CI team, recounts a real incident where an agent tasked with self-cleanup deleted 200 workloads — including uncheckpointed training jobs — in 90 seconds due to a filter bug, impacting 20 engineers. The talk argues that the standard 'give an agent a god token and a tool list' pattern breaks down at production scale and introduces primitives for scoping agent authority. This is a high-signal firsthand account from inside Anthropic about the gap between agent demos and production-safe agentic systems.