Glossary
Tool-call budget
A limit on how many tool calls one agent task, turn, or day is allowed to make.
A tool-call budget is the maximum number of tool calls a harness will allow for one task, one turn, or one day. It is separate from the token price. A search that costs a cent still counts as one call, and the next call counts again.
Claude’s web search tool exposes the turn cap as max_uses. A search past it returns max_uses_exceeded. Google’s grounding guide, read November 11, 2026, does not print a per-request cap. It prints a project cap: 1,500 grounding requests a day on Gemini 3 and newer in the Developer API paid tier. Four searches a task is 375 tasks before that cap. The arithmetic is on What is the best web search tool for an AI agent harness?.
How far the loop may go before a person is asked is autonomy. The cycle that spends the budget is the agent loop. A search the vendor runs inside one request is search grounding. The dollar side of a known token count is the AI agent cost calculator.