Protocol Compression Changes Which Party Pays: Bilateral Cost in Cross-Organization LLM Agent Communication
Agents that talk across organizations exchange long messages billed by the token. A shorter notation therefore looks like a saving that costs nothing but an agreement to use it. Recent work reports the saving is conditional. Compressed notation can instead raise total tokens by 8% to 11% over a JSON baseline, when parsing failures force extra model calls. That is measured for one payer. Between two organizations neither side can install a decoder at the other end, and each pays under its own tokenizer, price, and cache state. We measure both sides. A preregistered token-level study covered 198 content-matched item pairs across six vendors, for 2,376 native-usage cells. We then overlay an ...
| Authors | Janghoon Lee |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 5 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 5 September 2026 |
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