- family
- resource-exhaustion
- severity
- systemic
- triggerError
- A coordinator's nested sub-agent delegation feature (agents dispatching further agents to manage complex subtasks) lacks an enforced depth or breadth limit, so a single user request triggers recursive spawning.
- mechanism
- Because each spawned sub-agent is itself permitted to dispatch further child sub-agents, and the runtime has no server-side nesting cap, the delegation tree grows exponentially. Unlike a cyclic feedback loop (where a single process repeats), this creates an exponential tree of new processes, each consuming its own token budget and API quota.
- blastRadius
- Practitioners reported a single session's recursive tree burning roughly four million tokens in under five minutes, exhausting an entire Pro Max 20x five-hour budget instantly. The June 2, 2026 outage affected Claude's web interface, developer console, and Claude Code simultaneously; Anthropic issued emergency refunds.
- detection
- Alert on sub-agent delegation depth or concurrent-subagent count exceeding a small threshold (the platform's post-incident cap is 5 levels); monitor token-consumption rate per session for exponential-growth signatures.
- mitigation
- Enforce nesting-depth limits server-side rather than relying on a client-honoured flag alone; Anthropic's fix was a hard 5-level cap in Claude Code v2.1.172. Additionally, impose per-session token-rate budgets that trigger circuit-breaker shutdown before exponential consumption exhausts the account.
