PRODUCTION SCENARIO
Your code-audit agent runs on Claude Opus 5 with the task budgets beta turned on, and it makes 30 to 80 tool calls per task. Finance wants each task to land near 120,000 tokens, and you want the agent to close with a findings summary rather than stop mid-action. An engineer proposes setting max_tokens to 120,000 as the only control.
Which configuration meets both goals?
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Show answer and explanation
Answer: Set a 120,000-token task_budget for pacing, and keep max_tokens as the per-request ceiling
A task budget gives Claude a running countdown across the whole agentic loop and is advisory, so the model wraps up gracefully as it nears the target while max_tokens stays the enforced per-request ceiling. Relying on max_tokens alone caps each request rather than the loop and cuts the agent off mid-action. Decrementing the remaining value while resending full history under-reports the budget and ends tasks early.
Official Source: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/task-budgets ↗