Agentic AI Systems Should Be Designed as Marginal Token Allocators

ArXi:2605.01214v1 Announce Type: new This position paper argues that agentic AI systems should be designed and evaluated as \emph{marginal token allocation economies} rather than as text generators priced by the unit. We follow a single request -- a developer asking a coding agent to fix a failing test -- through four economic layers that today are designed in isolation: a router that decides which model answers, an agent that decides whether to plan, act, verify, or defer, a serving stack that decides how to produce each token, and a.