import Link from 'next/link';
import { ArrowLeft, Calendar, Clock, ArrowRight, AlertTriangle, CheckCircle, Bot, Users, DollarSign } from 'lucide-react';

export const metadata = {
  title: 'Agent Swarm Cost Control: Hierarchical Budgets for Multi-Agent Systems',
  description: 'Control agent swarm costs with hierarchical budgets, scoped delegation tokens, cascade revocation, and request-path enforcement for multi-agent systems.',
  alternates: { canonical: 'https://satgate.io/blog/agent-swarms-cost-governance' },
  keywords: ['AI agent swarm cost control', 'multi-agent API governance', 'agent orchestration budget', 'AI agent delegation', 'autonomous agent spend'],
  openGraph: {
    title: 'Agent Swarm Cost Control: Hierarchical Budgets for Agents',
    description: 'Control agent swarm costs with hierarchical budgets, scoped delegation tokens, cascade revocation, and request-path enforcement.',
    url: 'https://satgate.io/blog/agent-swarms-cost-governance',
    type: 'article',
    publishedTime: '2026-03-05T00:00:00Z',
  },
  twitter: {
    card: 'summary_large_image',
    title: 'Agent Swarm Cost Control: Hierarchical Budgets for Agents',
    description: 'Govern multi-agent systems with parent budgets, scoped sub-agent delegation, cascade revocation, and hard spend caps.',
  },
};

export default function AgentSwarmsCostGovernancePage() {
  const articleJsonLd = {
    '@context': 'https://schema.org',
    '@type': 'TechArticle',
    headline: 'Agent Swarm Cost Control: Hierarchical Budgets for Multi-Agent Systems',
    description: metadata.description,
    author: { '@type': 'Organization', name: 'SatGate' },
    publisher: { '@type': 'Organization', name: 'SatGate', url: 'https://satgate.io' },
    datePublished: '2026-03-05',
    dateModified: '2026-05-04',
    mainEntityOfPage: 'https://satgate.io/blog/agent-swarms-cost-governance',
    about: [
      { '@type': 'Thing', name: 'agent swarm cost control' },
      { '@type': 'Thing', name: 'hierarchical budgets for multi-agent systems' },
      { '@type': 'Thing', name: 'scoped delegation tokens' },
      { '@type': 'Thing', name: 'cascade revocation for agent swarms' },
      { '@type': 'Thing', name: 'request-path multi-agent spend enforcement' },
    ],
  };

  const faqJsonLd = {
    '@context': 'https://schema.org',
    '@type': 'FAQPage',
    mainEntity: [
      {
        '@type': 'Question',
        name: 'Why do agent swarms create runaway spend risk?',
        acceptedAnswer: {
          '@type': 'Answer',
          text: 'Agent swarms multiply cost because a coordinator can spawn sub-agents, each with its own tools, retries, fanout, and API calls. One user task can become thousands of paid calls unless budgets roll up across the delegation tree.',
        },
      },
      {
        '@type': 'Question',
        name: 'How should teams control multi-agent spending?',
        acceptedAnswer: {
          '@type': 'Answer',
          text: 'Teams should use hierarchical budgets, scoped delegation tokens, cascade revocation, and request-path enforcement so each sub-agent can spend only within the parent agent’s authority.',
        },
      },
      {
        '@type': 'Question',
        name: 'Why is gateway-level enforcement better than framework callbacks?',
        acceptedAnswer: {
          '@type': 'Answer',
          text: 'Gateway-level enforcement works across frameworks and blocks costly calls before they execute. Framework callbacks often observe spend after the request and only cover agents built with that framework.',
        },
      },
      {
        '@type': 'Question',
        name: 'How do hierarchical budgets work for agent swarms?',
        acceptedAnswer: {
          '@type': 'Answer',
          text: 'A parent agent receives a total budget, then delegates smaller scoped budgets to sub-agents. Child agents can spend only inside their delegated allowance, and the whole swarm cannot exceed the parent ceiling.',
        },
      },
    ],
  };

  return (
    <div className="min-h-screen bg-black text-gray-100 font-sans">
      <script type="application/ld+json" dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{ __html: JSON.stringify(articleJsonLd) }} />
      <script type="application/ld+json" dangerouslySetInnerHTML={{ __html: JSON.stringify(faqJsonLd) }} />
      <div className="max-w-3xl mx-auto px-6 py-16">
        <Link href="/blog" className="text-gray-500 hover:text-white flex items-center gap-2 transition mb-8">
          <ArrowLeft size={18} /> Back to Blog
        </Link>

        <header className="mb-12">
          <div className="flex flex-wrap gap-2 mb-4">
            <span className="px-2 py-1 rounded-full bg-purple-900/30 border border-purple-500/30 text-purple-300 text-xs font-mono">Agent Economy</span>
            <span className="px-2 py-1 rounded-full bg-red-900/30 border border-red-500/30 text-red-300 text-xs font-mono">Cost Control</span>
            <span className="px-2 py-1 rounded-full bg-cyan-900/30 border border-cyan-500/30 text-cyan-300 text-xs font-mono">Multi-Agent</span>
          </div>
          <h1 className="text-4xl md:text-5xl font-extrabold tracking-tight mb-4">
            Agent Swarms Are Here. Who&apos;s Controlling the Spend?
          </h1>
          <div className="flex items-center gap-4 text-sm text-gray-500">
            <span className="flex items-center gap-1"><Calendar size={14} /> March 5, 2026</span>
            <span className="flex items-center gap-1"><Clock size={14} /> 7 min read</span>
          </div>
        </header>

        <article className="prose prose-invert prose-lg max-w-none">
          <p className="text-xl text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            The agent era shifted gears. It&apos;s no longer one agent, one task, one API key. It&apos;s 
            swarms — coordinator agents spawning specialist agents, each making their own API calls, 
            each spending money. And the cost math changes dramatically when agents multiply.
          </p>

          <h2 className="text-2xl font-bold mt-12 mb-4 text-white">The Multiplication Problem</h2>
          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            A single agent making 100 API calls per task is manageable. A coordinator that spawns 5 
            sub-agents, each making 100 calls, each spawning 3 more specialists? That&apos;s 2,000+ calls 
            from what started as one request.
          </p>

          <div className="bg-gray-900 border border-gray-800 rounded-xl p-6 my-8 font-mono text-sm">
            <p className="text-gray-500 mb-3"># Agent delegation tree — real-world scenario</p>
            <div className="space-y-1 text-gray-300">
              <p>📋 <span className="text-purple-400">Project Manager</span> (budget: $500)</p>
              <p className="pl-4">├── 🔍 <span className="text-cyan-400">Research Agent</span> (delegated: $100)</p>
              <p className="pl-8">│   ├── 🌐 Web Search Agent ($30)</p>
              <p className="pl-8">│   └── 📊 Data Analysis Agent ($70)</p>
              <p className="pl-4">├── 💻 <span className="text-green-400">Coding Agent</span> (delegated: $200)</p>
              <p className="pl-8">│   ├── 🧪 Test Agent ($50)</p>
              <p className="pl-8">│   └── 📝 Docs Agent ($30)</p>
              <p className="pl-4">└── 🎨 <span className="text-yellow-400">Design Agent</span> (delegated: $100)</p>
              <p className="pl-8">    └── 🖼️ Image Gen Agent ($80)</p>
            </div>
            <p className="text-gray-500 mt-4"># 8 agents, all spending concurrently</p>
            <p className="text-gray-500"># Without governance: $500 budget becomes $???</p>
          </div>

          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            The problem isn&apos;t that agents are expensive individually. It&apos;s that they compound. 
            A coding agent that loops on a failing test, a research agent that broadens its search, 
            an image gen agent that iterates on a design — each agent has its own optimization loop, 
            and loops cost money.
          </p>

          <h2 className="text-2xl font-bold mt-12 mb-4 text-white">Why Existing Solutions Fall Short</h2>
          
          <div className="space-y-6 my-8">
            <div className="bg-gray-900 border border-gray-800 rounded-xl p-5">
              <div className="flex items-start gap-3">
                <AlertTriangle className="text-yellow-400 mt-1 shrink-0" size={18} />
                <div>
                  <p className="text-white font-semibold mb-1">API keys per agent</p>
                  <p className="text-gray-400 text-sm">
                    You could give each agent its own API key with a spending limit at the provider level 
                    (e.g., OpenAI spend caps). But when a coordinator delegates to sub-agents, each sub-agent 
                    needs its own key. Key management becomes combinatorial. And there&apos;s no hierarchical 
                    budget — sub-agents&apos; limits don&apos;t roll up to a parent ceiling.
                  </p>
                </div>
              </div>
            </div>

            <div className="bg-gray-900 border border-gray-800 rounded-xl p-5">
              <div className="flex items-start gap-3">
                <AlertTriangle className="text-yellow-400 mt-1 shrink-0" size={18} />
                <div>
                  <p className="text-white font-semibold mb-1">Application-level tracking</p>
                  <p className="text-gray-400 text-sm">
                    You could build cost tracking into your agent framework. LangChain has callbacks, 
                    CrewAI tracks token usage. But this is per-framework — if your swarm uses agents 
                    from different frameworks (increasingly common), you need a unified layer. And 
                    application-level tracking happens after the call, not before.
                  </p>
                </div>
              </div>
            </div>

            <div className="bg-gray-900 border border-gray-800 rounded-xl p-5">
              <div className="flex items-start gap-3">
                <AlertTriangle className="text-yellow-400 mt-1 shrink-0" size={18} />
                <div>
                  <p className="text-white font-semibold mb-1">Rate limiting</p>
                  <p className="text-gray-400 text-sm">
                    Rate limits don&apos;t understand delegation trees. If a coordinator is rate-limited 
                    to 100 req/min, but its sub-agents each get their own 100 req/min, the total swarm 
                    throughput is 800 req/min. More importantly, requests per minute ≠ dollars per minute.
                  </p>
                </div>
              </div>
            </div>
          </div>

          <h2 className="text-2xl font-bold mt-12 mb-4 text-white">The Solution: Hierarchical Economic Governance</h2>
          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            What agent swarms need is economic governance at the infrastructure layer — a single enforcement 
            point that understands delegation, budgets, and attribution regardless of which framework spawned 
            the agent.
          </p>

          <div className="space-y-4 my-8">
            <div className="flex items-start gap-3">
              <CheckCircle className="text-green-400 mt-1 shrink-0" size={18} />
              <div>
                <p className="text-white font-semibold">Hierarchical budgets</p>
                <p className="text-gray-400">The coordinator gets a total budget. When it delegates to sub-agents, it carves out a portion. Sub-agents can never collectively exceed the parent&apos;s allocation. The math is enforced cryptographically.</p>
              </div>
            </div>
            <div className="flex items-start gap-3">
              <CheckCircle className="text-green-400 mt-1 shrink-0" size={18} />
              <div>
                <p className="text-white font-semibold">Cascade revocation</p>
                <p className="text-gray-400">If a coordinator goes rogue, revoke its token. Every agent in the delegation tree is instantly invalidated — no need to track down individual agents.</p>
              </div>
            </div>
            <div className="flex items-start gap-3">
              <CheckCircle className="text-green-400 mt-1 shrink-0" size={18} />
              <div>
                <p className="text-white font-semibold">Scope attenuation</p>
                <p className="text-gray-400">A research agent shouldn&apos;t call code execution tools. Delegation tokens carry scope restrictions — each level can only narrow the scope, never widen it.</p>
              </div>
            </div>
            <div className="flex items-start gap-3">
              <CheckCircle className="text-green-400 mt-1 shrink-0" size={18} />
              <div>
                <p className="text-white font-semibold">Cross-framework enforcement</p>
                <p className="text-gray-400">Because enforcement happens at the gateway (HTTP/MCP layer), it doesn&apos;t matter if agents are built with LangChain, AutoGen, CrewAI, or raw API calls. Same budget, same rules.</p>
              </div>
            </div>
          </div>

          <h2 className="text-2xl font-bold mt-12 mb-4 text-white">What This Looks Like in Practice</h2>

          <pre className="bg-gray-900 border border-gray-800 rounded-xl p-6 text-sm font-mono text-gray-300 overflow-x-auto my-6">
{`# 1. Mint a coordinator token
satgate mint --agent "project-mgr" --budget 500

# 2. Coordinator delegates to sub-agents
satgate delegate --from <pm-token> \\
  --to "research" --budget 100 --scope "/api/search*"
satgate delegate --from <pm-token> \\
  --to "coder" --budget 200 --scope "/api/code*"

# 3. Sub-agents delegate further
satgate delegate --from <coder-token> \\
  --to "test-runner" --budget 50 --scope "/api/code/test*"

# 4. Every agent hits the same gateway
# Budget enforced at each level
# Total spend across entire tree ≤ 500`}
          </pre>

          <h2 className="text-2xl font-bold mt-12 mb-4 text-white">The Enterprise Angle</h2>
          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed">
            For enterprises, agent swarms are a budget governance nightmare. Different departments run 
            different agents on different APIs. Without centralized economic governance:
          </p>
          <ul className="text-gray-300 space-y-2">
            <li>Finance can&apos;t allocate AI budgets per department</li>
            <li>Security can&apos;t enforce least-privilege spending</li>
            <li>Engineering can&apos;t debug cost spikes across agent trees</li>
            <li>Compliance can&apos;t audit who authorized what spend</li>
          </ul>
          <p className="text-gray-300 leading-relaxed mt-4">
            An economic firewall gives every stakeholder what they need: Finance gets budget enforcement, 
            Security gets scope attenuation, Engineering gets attribution, Compliance gets an immutable Evidence Pack.
          </p>

          <section className="not-prose mt-16 rounded-2xl border border-gray-800 bg-gray-950 p-8">
            <p className="mb-2 text-sm font-mono uppercase tracking-wide text-purple-300">FAQ</p>
            <h2 className="mb-6 text-2xl font-bold text-white">Agent swarm cost governance questions</h2>
            <div className="space-y-5">
              {[
                ['Why do agent swarms create runaway spend risk?', 'Agent swarms multiply cost because a coordinator can spawn sub-agents, each with its own tools, retries, fanout, and API calls. One user task can become thousands of paid calls unless budgets roll up across the delegation tree.'],
                ['How should teams control multi-agent spending?', 'Use hierarchical budgets, scoped delegation tokens, cascade revocation, and request-path enforcement so each sub-agent can spend only within the parent agent’s authority.'],
                ['Why is gateway-level enforcement better than framework callbacks?', 'Gateway-level enforcement works across frameworks and blocks costly calls before they execute. Framework callbacks often observe spend after the request and only cover agents built with that framework.'],
                ['How do hierarchical budgets work for agent swarms?', 'A parent agent receives a total budget, then delegates smaller scoped budgets to sub-agents. Child agents can spend only inside their delegated allowance, and the whole swarm cannot exceed the parent ceiling.'],
              ].map(([question, answer]) => (
                <div key={question} className="border-t border-gray-800 pt-5 first:border-t-0 first:pt-0">
                  <h3 className="mb-2 text-lg font-bold text-white">{question}</h3>
                  <p className="leading-relaxed text-gray-400">{answer}</p>
                </div>
              ))}
            </div>
          </section>

          <div className="bg-gradient-to-r from-purple-900/30 to-cyan-900/30 border border-purple-500/20 rounded-xl p-8 mt-12 text-center">
            <h3 className="text-xl font-bold text-white mb-3">Control your agent swarm&apos;s spend</h3>
            <p className="text-gray-400 mb-6">SatGate is open source. Deploy in 5 minutes. See the delegation demo live.</p>
            <div className="flex flex-wrap gap-4 justify-center">
              <Link href="/protect" className="bg-gradient-to-r from-purple-600 to-cyan-600 text-white px-6 py-3 rounded-lg font-bold hover:opacity-90 transition flex items-center gap-2">
                See Demo <ArrowRight size={16} />
              </Link>
              <Link href="/govern" className="border border-purple-700/50 bg-purple-900/20 px-6 py-3 rounded-lg font-bold hover:bg-purple-900/40 transition text-purple-300">
                Enterprise Governance
              </Link>
            </div>
          </div>
        </article>

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          <Link href="/blog" className="text-gray-500 hover:text-white flex items-center gap-2 transition">
            <ArrowLeft size={18} /> More articles
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        </footer>
      </div>
    </div>
  );
}
