AI RESEARCH
Tool Attention Is All You Need: Dynamic Tool Gating and Lazy Schema Loading for Eliminating the MCP/Tools Tax in Scalable Agentic Workflows
arXiv CS.AI
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ArXi:2604.21816v1 Announce Type: new The Model Context Protocol (MCP) has become a common interface for connecting large language model (LLM) agents to external tools, but its reliance on stateless, eager schema injection imposes a hidden per-turn overhead the MCP Tax or Tools Tax that practitioner reports place between roughly 10k and 60k tokens in typical multi-server deployments.